CoolPay allows you to accept ACH (bank account draft) donations, and you can enable it as a setting on each donation form. Before you enable it, however, we want to make sure your organization understands the risks that come with ACH. These risks exist with any provider — they're a function of how ACH works throughout banking — so we'd rather be upfront than have you learn the hard way.
ACH allows lower fees for your donors. In exchange, it shifts some of the risk of fraud and returned payments onto the organization receiving the funds. Most providers won't mention this; they simply describe ACH as a way to lower fees.
When a donor enters their ACH (bank) information, the only piece that can be verified is the bank's routing number. The actual account number cannot be verified, and unlike a credit card, there's no way to check whether the account has sufficient funds.
Because of that, ACH takes a few days to process — almost exactly like a paper check. If the donor mistypes their account number, or doesn't have enough funds, the transaction is rejected like a bad check, and that typically comes with a returned-item fee of roughly $15–$45+, depending on the bank.
In practice, we've seen very few issues with ACH. We just want you to understand the fee risk so that there are no surprises.
ACH is a per-donation-form setting you control — each donation form has an option to allow ACH (bank) payments, so you can decide exactly which forms accept it.
• Leave it off on a form to accept cards only.
• Turn it on for a form to allow donors to pay by bank transfer (ACH).
Because this feature is per form, a common approach is to keep your main forms card-only and turn ACH on for one specific form that you share with the donors who prefer paying by bank. That keeps the fee risk limited to the audience you choose.
