Once a customer saves a card on file, it can be used on any kind of new invoice, one-time or recurring. When you select a card on file, "Due" goes away and only "Send" remains, allowing you to choose a date to charge the card if you don't want to do it immediately. My guess is that the customer only receives the invoice once the card is charged, thereby making it more of a receipt. 

Hi CompuPane,

Thanks for the reply.  Essentially, yes.  The customer would be receiving a receipt at that point.  

All I want to be able to do is automatically charge the card on file for the amount of the automatically generated and sent invoice.  

So, to clarify, I select the card on file, I will see "Send" and will choose a date to charge the card, correct?  This will charge the card on file each interval I set going forward, correct?

Thanks!

As long as you select recurring then it should work. When you select a recurring series, it should prompt you for the recurring period (weekly, monthly, etc.). 

AWESOME! Thanks so much for your help and your quick response!  I'll let you know how it goes. 🙂

DN

I have a client who has saved their card on a recurring invoice and it is not charging it. I have to remind them to pay each month. The card is still on file.

Thank You Chad. I found out I needed to enter myself also  the card the customer saved . I also had to check on the invoice the card I wanted to charge. then it all went smooth. Thanks again.

I don't have their card info. They save it themselves. There's not a place for me to check the saved card as the one for the invoice.

Yes you do need to select this as the payment option for the invoice. 

Ok, this was very confusing and I'm a web designer. I found out that you have to go to the recurring invoices, click on an active invoice, click on "Edit Series", scroll down to the section where it says "Allow automatic payments with card on file" and check the box and then finally scroll to the top and click "Update".

That was about as stupid as a 2005 website! I had to search the help section and then watch a video to even get a clue of how to do this. That was not user-friendly at all.

Hey @FullDigital

Thanks for the feedback around this and sorry for the confusion. 

Was there a better way that we can present this or maybe a change that you'd like to see?

I think the challenge is that the box to check "Allow automatic payments with card on file" didn't exist when we set up these recurring invoices originally. So our invoices were not getting paid automatically. I've noticed a few changes to the system over the past couple of months and this is one of them.

Now that any recurring invoice has to be checked there is no knowledge base or direction on how to do that if it wasn't set up that way originally.

I kept going into the individual invoices and trying to find a checkbox and there is nothing there. I finally found the video on how to set up a recurring invoice and realized I had to go to the series to make edits.

The initial and current directions are not clear. Even the following link does not give the proper step by step directions.

https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5096

It tells us to do what we've always been doing and that is to simply check the box to allow a customer to save their card. That is what your website and marketing materials told us would create automatic payments. Not true apparently. There is now another step that was never clear from the beginning. 

So all of the invoices created before you added the "Allow automatic payments with card on file" were not processing payments automatically.

Not sure how this was missed along the way. I don't know when you added "Allow automatic payments with card on file" to the recurring invoices but it wasn't there when we set these up originally but it is now.

Now you just need to CLEARLY tell users how to go back and correct old recurring invoices or how they need to go edit a series to add automatic payments to an invoice.

Thanks so much for going into detail on this @FullDigital 

I'll pass this over to our Invoices team and hopefully we can get both a better way to navigate to this option as well as more clear instructions implemented to help with this.

Keep an eye out for updates!

I believe it is not possible at the moment. Once the card is recorded, you will have to go manually to your Square account apply the charge to the card on file. 

Is there a way to be informed when a customer adds a card on file? People are getting upset with us because we don't know they've switched to card-on-file and so I don't set it that way on their receipt. Why can't this happen automatically if they check the box?

Hi @wbcats, there isn't a notification sent to you when your customer adds their card on file. I do see how that would be useful and I'll share that request with our team. Very sorry to hear it's upsetting your customers!

For now, as a workaround, when the customer pays their invoice you can check if they've added their card on file from the Customers tab of your online Dashboard:

1. Sign into your account online at squareup.com/dashboard.
2. Click Customers.
3. Click Filters in the upper right > select Card on File.

From this list you'll be able to see if your customer did add their card, and you can also click on your customer's name for additional information about your customer. I hope this helps in the meantime! 

Hello, I followed the step-by-step you outlined and when I go to edit the recurring series, it already has selected Delivery Method as “Charge card on file” and Payment Method as “Credit or Debit Card”.

So it looks like my client already selected automatic payment, but for some reason it is not charging the card.

Yes, this was helpful. Thank you @Joe 

Perfect! Good to hear, @DocMeg! Please don't hesitate to reach out if anything else comes up!

📈🍻