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Help Center GeneralWhat's New

What's New - June 2023

We're always upgrading ChargeDesk and think of our service as a work in progress. We try to balance performing upgrades to better service existing customers with adding new features to help bring in new customers. Much of the work we do is driven by customer feedback and feature requests. We'd love to hear any ideas you might have!

Lists, Lists, Lists!

Are lists exciting? We think so! We're pleased to have added a whole new "List" tab to our helpdesk and mobile apps. This tab is available to all agents with list permissions and shows lists of important data such as Recent Charges, New Customers and Upcoming Subscriptions. Admins with reporting access can also view Recent Agent Activity from this tab as well.

This view gives you a quick look at recent and important activity on your account right where you need it most - inside your helpdesk or on the go on your phone. The List tab is enabled by default. You can disable it by removing list permissions from agent roles, or you can disable the List tab for an entire company from Setup > App Settings > Set "Show List" to "Disabled".

Delivery Email Addresses

You can now edit a customer's delivery email address and email subscription status from right inside our apps. While this functionality was previously available inside our web UI, by bringing it inside our apps you can now view and update this status much more easily. The delivery email address(es) will be used for all receipts, requests, dunning and other email notifications. Setting the customer to be unsubscribed will stop the delivery of automatic emails to the customer.

Double Confirmations

We have added a new security feature to help reduce the chance of accidental refunds, cancellations and new charges being performed. You can now enable double confirmations of key actions from Setup > Security for each of these features. Once enabled, agents will see a confirmation dialogue such as the one above before a key actions is performed.

Zapier Integration

ChargeDesk has a brand-new integration with Zapier! After a long private beta, we've reworked the entire integration to be easier to use and to cover a wider range of use-cases. It's now available for anyone to install and use from the Zapier website.

Try our new Zapier integration today!

Square Integration

ChargeDesk now supports Square! Square is a popular solution for both taking in-person and online payments. Their offerings include the Square Reader and Square Online.

ChargeDesk's integration allows you to manage both individual payment and subscriptions inside your existing helpdesk. Start managing your Shopify inside your favourite helpdesk!

Subscription Emails

We now support sending the following emails for subscriptions in various stages of their life cycles;

You can set how many days before payment you'd like to send the trial ending and upcoming payment emails. The templates for all emails can be edited from Setup > Templates. These emails are all disabled by default and you can enable them from Setup > Emails under the Subscription section for each gateway you have connected.

Request Reminders

We now support automatically sending reminders for unpaid payment requests. You can set the interval between the reminders and the maximum number of reminders to send. The template for these reminders can be edited as well. These are disabled by default and can be enabled from Setup > Payment Pages.

Shopify Integration

We're pleased to publicly release our brand new Shopify integration! You can now manage your Shopify orders inside Zendesk, Front, Help Scout, Freshdesk, LiveAgent, Intercom, LiveChat, Desk.com, AzureDesk, HubSpot, Missive, Gmail, Email, Chrome or via your mobile device.

Our integration also comes with a unique feature: order creation. You can create live carts for customers while they're chatting with your support agents.

Start managing your Shopify inside your helpdesk today!

Stripe Subscription Scheduling & Marking Invoices Uncollectible

When editing a Stripe Subscription through ChargeDesk you can now schedule plan changes for the end of the current billing cycle. This will apply any plan changes you may just before the customer makes their next payment on the subscription. To enable this feature, go to Setup > Gateways > Configure next to Stripe > Set "Schedule Changes" to "Enabled".

Failed Stripe invoices can now be marked as uncollectible using ChargeDesk. This is particularly useful when cancelling subscription if you would also like to stop retries on outstanging invoice for the customer. To enable this feature, go to Setup > Gateways > Configure next to Stripe > Set "Mark Uncollectible" to "Enabled".

PayPal IPN

We've recently added support for connecting the PayPal IPN to ChargeDesk. Adding the IPN connection to your existing PayPal integration with ChargeDesk will ensure that data is synchronized more quickly. It may also provide some additional data to your account, particularly for subscriptions and disputes. All companies can now add an IPN connection for their account by going to Setup > Gateways > Configure next to PayPal > Connect IPN.

Metadata Editing

Metadata can now be edit directly from our web interface. Just click the edit button against a customer or charge and you'll see a metadata section at the bottom that allows you to edit or add metadata to these records. Metadata is viewable wherever a customer or charge is shown.

earlier updates

Accept Payments with WooCommerce

You can now enable ChargeDesk to accept payments via your WooCommerce store! You no longer need to add additional gateways in order to accept payments. Agents can use our payment request form to generate a cart to send to a customer to complete on your store.

As this feature requires a couple of additional plugins, it is not enable by default. You can enable it from Setup > Gateways > Configure next to WooCommerce > set Accept Payments to "Yes".

New Charge Update

We're pleased to release a huge update to our new charge form! This update includes a number of very frequently requested features, including the ability to add multiple once-off line items and to set line items as non-taxable.

All existing functionality for the form remains. Read all about it here!

Editable Activity Reasons

We've deployed a change to allow agents and admins to edit activity reasons on our web UI. Agents will be able to edit the reasons they provide for refunds and cancellations for up to 24 hours after the event has occurred. Admins will be able to edit all historic agent reasons. This allows mistakes made by agents to be more easily corrected for reporting and exported data.

CSV Import, Agent Logs, Dedicated SMS

As always we're constantly releasing upgrades to ChargeDesk. This update highlight a few notable changes.

There's now a CSV Import available at Setup > CSV Import. This feature is in beta and it allows you to import a CSV file containing records of charges, customers, subscriptions and products. We've designed the import to intelligently detect the types of data you are importing, but it also offers full controls of which fields you'd like to map to internal data. It should allow you to import CSV data containing core data from almost any external software.

Recent upgrades to our Agent Logs now include additional data such a gateway reference ids (for actions such as refunds). We also include transaction IDs in CSV and API exports to allow you to better match agent actions in external systems.

We now offer a Dedicated SMS setup for $60/mo which allow you to send SMS from a dedicated number specifically for your business. Having a dedicated number allows you to forward inbound calls and setup specific responses to customer replies. Please contact support if you're interested in enabling this on your account.

Performance & Security

As part of ongoing upgrades we've recently completed a significant migration of almost all of ChargeDesk's core infrastructure. This upgrade has been to; provide future capacity for growth, improve current performance, further harden our security infrastructure and data storage. While most of these changes have been behind the scenes, our monitoring software shows much more reliable response times. This will correspond to more consistent performance while you use ChargeDesk even under extremely heavy load.

The one immediate change you might also notice is that you may stay logged in for much longer periods on our web interface. You can now stay logged in for up to 12 hours. You can shorten this time from Account Setup > Account Details.

Missive Integration

Our latest integration is with Missive! Missive enables teams of all sizes to work more effectively together using email. Our integration brings our full range of features to Missive, including viewing your customers billing history, managing charge, subscriptions and much more.

Take a look at our new Missive integration.

Avalara Tax, Security & Authorization

We've rolled out a number of minor but important upgrade recently.

We now have a private beta available for an Avalara Tax integration. If you're using Avalara Tax and would like that information to be shown on ChargeDesk checkout pages, please contact support to join the beta.

We've added a number of security upgrades as part of our ongoing security hardening. While these upgrades should have no obvious impact to your daily use of ChargeDesk you can be assured that we are always upgrading and hardening our infrastructure to improve our security posture.

There is a new option at Setup > Payment Pages > Capture Payment that allows you to default individual payments to be authorizations only. This is useful for businesses that would hold an amount which might then be later captured, such as travel businesses or those taking bookings.

LiveAgent Integration

We are very pleased to add a commonly requested chat platform to our list of integrations with the new addition of support for LiveAgent! Our new LiveAgent integration enables you to view your payment data right next to LiveAgent chats. Refunds payments, manage subscriptions, request new payments and much more!

Try out our new LiveAgent integration right now!

Coupons, DKIM and the Demo Gateway

This update highlights a few of our more significant recent upgrades.

We've tweaked how coupons are managed from our apps. Clicking on the Edit button under a subscription gives you a tab which allows you to edit coupons for supported gateways (Stripe, Braintree and Recurly). Braintree is a brand new addition to this list. For Braintree you can edit the quantity and amount of coupons you set on subscriptions.

Our Email Delivery system has received an upgrade. We now support signing emails sent from any domain with DKIM. This improves desirability and allows you to set strict DMARC rules. You can find information on how to activate DKIM signing here: https://chargedesk.com/help/settings/from-email

Finally we've now added support for adding a Demo Gateway populated with example data to your account. New accounts will be automatically given this option when creating an account without a gateway. If you have an existing account and would like to add a company with demo data for testing purposes, please contact support for further information.

As an extra bonus, we now support adding custom favicons to our customer self-support portals. These are the small icons which appears in tabs when viewing a page in a web browser. Just go to Setup > Templates to add a favicon to your account.

Help Center

We've launched a new Help Center, in fact you're inside it right now!

Help Center brings together various guides which were previously distributed throughout our site and makes them accessible in a single location. We're also working on expanding out some key areas we feel need additional documentation.

If there's anything you see missing, which you'd like us to cover, please let us know!

Subscription Pausing

We've added in the ability to temporarily pause Stripe subscriptions. We've expedited this feature to give support agents an additional option when dealing with customers affected by COVID-19. Temporarily paused subscriptions can be set to automatically reactivate in the future. This helps you retain revenue which you might otherwise loose.

You can now also add a Pause Subscription button to embedded subscription components and self-support pages. This works for all gateways which support pausing or suspended subscriptions (Stripe, WooCommerce and PayPal). It can be enabled from Setup > Self-Support > Subscription Details > Subscription Button Settings > set "Pause Button" to "Enabled".

Update: We now support pausing subscriptions for Recurly as well. For Recurly you can set the number of billing cycles the subscription will be paused for.

Custom Integrations

ChargeDesk now supports integrating any payment platform using our API and custom callbacks. If you use a gateway not currently supported by ChargeDesk, or you would like to add custom logic to your billing support workflow, you can use our Custom Integration tools.

Features include adding arbitrary endpoints to receive agent actions. Individual agent actions can be enabled on a case-by-base basis.

If you manage a payment gateway or storefront and would like to leverage ChargeDesk's helpdesk integrations and billing support platform for your customers, we can turn your Custom Integration into a turnkey solution for all your customers.

Retina Logos, Security & Notifications

ChargeDesk is always adding minor features and improving various parts of our service. We'd like to highlight a few recent changes here which you might have missed!

We now support retina quality logos on all customer facing pages and emails. Any logo uploaded in our templating system will not automatically display in the highest resolution possible on all screens. If you're an existing customer, you can take advantage of this by uploading a new logo at Setup > Templates > Brand Logo.

We have re-organised some settings pages for clarity and added a new Security section. This section includes the new Company Limits which allow you to limit the number of refunds, cancellations or charges created for your company in a 24 hours period. This adds an extra layer of protection against rogue agents or external attackers.

It's now possible to enable a large range of a new email notifications from Setup > Notifications > Advanced Notifications. These notifications can be sent for events such as charge failures, first payments for a customer, subscription upgrades/downgrades and more. When the email address you enter goes to your helpdesk, the relevant payment data will also automatically populate in any of the ChargeDesk helpdesk apps.

Authorize.Net Integration

With the start of the new year we're pleased to launch support for our latest Gateway - Authorize.Net!

This new integration is very deep and we've implemented support for our full range of features. ChargeDesk now has full support for Authorize.Net including managing subscriptions, refunding charges, dunning, receipts and requesting payments from new customers.

Authorize.Net was founded all the way back in 1996 and has been one of our most requested integrations since we first launched. Connect Authorize.Net with your favourite helpdesk using ChargeDesk today!

Hubspot Integration

Our Hubspot integration has been in beta for several months. We're happy to finally bring it out as a full release! ChargeDesk now supports Hubspot Service Hub using our Chrome extension. You can see payment data next to Service Hub tickets from all your payment gateways connected to ChargeDesk.

Try out our new Hubspot integration right now!

Performance, Security and Styling Upgrades

As part of ongoing maintenance to ChargeDesk, we like to regularly review and improve core components of the ChargeDesk infrastructure.

We've recently deployed a large update which makes a number of fundamental changes behind the scenes. This update is primarily focused on improving performance, particularly for large accounts. In particular, we have significantly improved the speed for searches which return a large number of results. These searches should now complete in seconds, regardless of the volume of data matched.

This update has also added a number of additional security checks which further protect how your account data is accessed. Every single piece of data coming into and out of your account is now checked in multiple additional, new ways to ensure the person accessing the data has authority to view it.

Finally, we've updated all the icons, badges and some of the colors in our web interface. This is to make our styling more consistent across all our apps and UI components. Customers in our web interface now also include a status badge which show their subscription status.

Apple Pay, Google Pay & Microsoft Pay enabled for Stripe

ChargeDesk now automatically supports Apple Pay, Google Pay & Microsoft Pay for Stripe. When a customer views a form which can be completed via a payment method saved on their device, they'll now be given the option to do so. They can also choose to pay via another card, or PayPal if enabled. These additional payment methods have been enabled by default for all companies using Stripe. To change this setting, go to Setup > Gateways > Configure Stripe and select the payment methods you would like to make available.

Secure Customer Authentication

Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) is a new rule coming into effect on September 14th 2019 as part of PSD2 regulation in Europe. Some countries such as Australia and Brazil also have upcoming legislating mandating the use of SCA in some situations. The rule requires an additional authentication step, commonly known as 3D Secure, in many payment scenarios. Not implementing this step will increase payment declines in the coming months, particularly for businesses based in Europe.

We have been progressively working on rolling out SCA upgrades for all payment gateways we support. This most recent update brings all gateways we support (including Stripe, Braintree, PayPal and Recurly) to full SCA support.

In most cases these upgrades require no work on your part - when a customer is identified as requiring additional authentication, they will be prompted to do so. If a support agent attempts to create a payment which requires additional authentication from a customer (such as for a saved card where the bank declines automatic approval), the agent will be provided with a URL to which they can send the customer to approve the payment.

SCA is an evolving environment and the way it has been implemented is quite different by each gateway. This may change over the coming months, particularly once the September 14th deadline passes and live transactions start to be affected. If your business is based in Europe and would like to find out more, please contact support and we'll be happy to answer any questions you have!

Custom Domains

You can now use your own domain name with ChargeDesk! All customer-facing pages including checkout, update card and all billing support and history pages for your company can now be delivered from your domain.

It's easy to enable this - just add a CNAME record which points to custom.chargedesk.com and then save the domain on your account. Please read the help documentation to get started.

Style Refresh & New Support Themes

As part of an ongoing upgrade, we've made a number changes to streamline the styling of many ChargeDesk UI components. These changes have been primarily focused on our web UI, but they touch all parts of our apps. The updates aim to provide more consistency and to modernize the design.

As part of this update we've also introduced a number of new Page Themes for customer Self-Support pages. These themes include Lines (the new default), Edges, Curves, Classic (the default for existing customers) and Minimal. Try them out from Setup > Templates > Logo & Color.

Updating our design is an iterative process, so we'd love any feedback you'd like to share about these changes!

Affiliate Program

The ChargeDesk is pleased to bring our Affiliate Program out of beta. You can now refer a potential client to ChargeDesk and receive a 15% commission on every payment the client makes. This commission is valid for as long as the client uses ChargeDesk which could lead to a significant revenue stream over time.

Sign up here to generate a personalized Affiliate Link.

Self-Support Sign In

ChargeDesk now offers the ability for your customers to sign in to their self-support pages. These allow your customers to enter their email address (and optionally last 4 digits of their credit card) to authenticate themselves. No passwords are needed, the customer is just emailed a link they can use to login. This can be useful for allowing your customers to securely access or update their billing details if you don't know their customer ID. It also works really well when the new High Security mode by allowing customers to re-authenticate themselves if the page they are using expires.

This feature is enabled by default for all new companies using ChargeDesk. Existing companies can enable it from Setup > Customer Self-Support > Switch "Landing Page" to "Sign In Page".

Self-Support Sign In is also a new Embeddable Component which you can easily embed on your own website.

High Security Mode

Some companies need to meet a level of security compliance. For example, pages which include customer data may need to expire after a set period of time. We've just brought High Security mode out of beta and it is available for all companies using ChargeDesk. High Security mode adds additional protection to your customer self-support pages by adding a signature to all pages which include customer data. It is enabled be default for all new companies and existing companies using ChargeDesk read more about how to migrate to High Security mode.

WooCommerce Subscription Management

ChargeDesk now supports importing and managing subscriptions for WooCommerce stores. When you connect your WooCommerce store to ChargeDesk we'll automatically detect if you're using subscriptions and if so, import this data. This has automatically been enabled for all existing WooCommerce stores using ChargeDesk.

Zendesk Sync Tickets with Requests

We've recently rolled out the ability to sync Payment Requests with Zendesk tickets. When a payment request is created, a note will automatically added to the ticket with the information about the request. When the status of the charge is updated (i.e. it is pending, paid or fails), a new note will be added. Closed tickets will also be automatically re-opened when a request is paid or fails.

This feature will significantly improve the workflow of companies taking payments through Zendesk. We're working on rolling this out to other helpdesks in the near future. You can enable it from Setup > Helpdesks > Configure Zendesk > Sync Tickets & Requests.

Customer Tags & Failed Retries

Customers with subscriptions in our apps will now show a tag at the top which gives an overview of their state. For example, this might show Trialing, Active, Past Due, Unpaid or Canceled. This quickly gives support agents an understand of a customer at a glance. Hovering over the tag shows additional information.

Stripe customers in a Past Due or Unpaid state will also now show a Retry Failed Payment button which quickly allows the agent to retry failed charges on the customer's account. The Retry Failed Charges button is also available on the Update Card page for stripe customers. Support for the retry button will be rolled out to more gateways soon.

Refunds & Cancellation Reason Codes

You can now enable reason codes for your support agents when performing refunds or cancellations. This allows your agents to quickly select from a list of pre-defined reasons. This can dramatically improve your reporting and understanding of agent activity, particularly for large accounts. Reason codes, when enabled, will be included in all agent activity reporting including our new Agent Activity Charts.

Enable this feature from Setup > Agent Logs and set "Reason Input" to "Select Box". You can then enter the list of reasons you'd like available for your agents.

Mobile Apps are Live!

The ChargeDesk mobile apps are now live in the iOS App Store and Android Play Store! Thank you to everyone who has helped beta test these apps over the past 6 months. We're still building out features for these apps including additional reporting and notifications. If there's anything particular you'd like to see added please let us know.

Download on the App Store Get it on Google Play

New Web Controls

We've finally brought a number of functions which were previously only available in our apps, over to our web interface. You can now request payments, refund while cancelling subscriptions, edit requests, charge existing customers and much more directly on ChargeDesk.com! The interface for these new control will match the interface you're already used to in our apps to make things super simple.

This has been enabled automatically for all accounts using your existing agent access permissions.

LiveChat

Our latest helpdesk integration is with LiveChat! LiveChat is an offline customer service software with live support, help desk software, and web analytics capabilities. It was first launched in 2002. ChargeDesk now has a full native app integration with LiveChat which you can use to manage payments from Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, WooCommerce, Recurly, Zuora, Chargify & more right next to your chats!

WooCommerce

We've just launched support for WooCommerce stores! WooCommerce is an incredibly popular open source eCommerce platform built for WordPress. If you have a WooCommerce store, you can now connect your store to ChargeDesk and start managing your customers inside your favourite helpdesk!

Google Analytics and Metadata Templates

We have recently added support for ecommerce tracking with Google Analytics inside of ChargeDesk checkout pages. By adding a Google Analytics tracking number at Setup > Customer Self-Support > Google Analytics, ecommerce events will automatically be populated when a customer completes a transaction with ChargeDesk. Existing customers using our Google Analytics tracking do not need to make any changes to access this data. It will be automatically populated in the Conversions section of your Google Analytics account.

Metadata is also now available to be inserted inside of our templates. You can now access metadata for charges and customers in templates using the format {metadata_charge_METADATA_KEY} or {metadata_customer_METADATA_KEY} where METADATA_KEY is the key of the metadata you'd like to access.

Mobile App Beta

We're pleased to launch a public beta of our mobile apps for iOS and Andriod. Our mobile apps allow you to manage your customers on the go. You can create new charges, subscriptions and all other features available in our helpdesk apps. These mobile apps also include detailed notifications which allow you keep track of new customers and subscription changes instantly.

You can join our iOS beta from TestFlight or join our Android beta from Google Play.

We'll be continuing to work on these apps before release, so please send any feedback or features request our way!

Updated App Settings

Over the past few weeks we've deployed a number of updates which allow you to have more control over how our apps function for your company. You can now make changes to what information is displayed as well as default settings for things like performing cancellation (at period end or immediately) etc... You can now also separately configure ticket matching criteria to search matching criteria. This allows you to, say, disable matching tickets based on a customer's name, but still make this available for searches.

You can now access these updated features from Setup > App Settings and Setup > App Criteria.

New Freshdesk Mint Apps

We've recently updated all of our Freshdesk apps to support the fantastic new Freshdesk Mint UI. This new version of our app runs even faster than previous versions and ties in even more closely with the Freshdesk UI. You can find a listing of all our apps here: https://apps.freshdesk.com/search/?uq=chargedesk

To install our new Apps inside the Mint UI, you'll need to go to Admin > Apps > Click the "Get More Apps" button > Search "chargedesk" > Click the "Install" button on the app which matches your primary gateway.

Zendesk Multi-Company Support

A long requested feature has been to allow agents authenticated via their Zendesk account to work with data from multiple ChargeDesk companies. For example, if a company has more than one Stripe account connected to ChargeDesk via different companies they would need a way to show data from all their companies inside a single Zendesk account. Previously the only work around was to create separate ChargeDesk accounts for each agent and require them to login to the ChargeDesk app with that account to load the data.

Companies can now configure their Zendesk connection to load data from all their connected ChargeDesk companies using native Zendesk authentication. If you have multiple ChargeDesk companies, you can activate this from Setup > Helpdesks > Configure Zendesk > Select the "Connected Companies" you would like available inside Zendesk.

Braintree Upgrades

We've upgraded our Braintree integration to use the recently released Braintree OAuth flow. This allows you to connect your Braintree account to ChargeDesk in seconds - no code or copying keys required! Existing customers using our integration do not need to make any changes. We'll continue to support existing direct API integrations indefinitely.

As part of these upgrades all accounts can add a webhook from their Braintree account to ChargeDesk from Setup > Gateways > Braintree Payments. This will allow us to much more quickly sync any subscriptions and their charges from your Braintree account.

If you're not yet using ChargeDesk you can now sign up with your Braintree account using our upgraded integration.

Stripe Partner Program

ChargeDesk is proud to be one of the first companies to join the new Stripe Partner Program. Most people today don’t know that only three percent of GDP is online. That’s why we’re excited to join the program to increase internet commerce and help companies start, run, and scale their businesses.

By joining the Stripe Partner Program, our mutual customers will now benefit from the combination of ChargeDesk’s billing support tools with Stripe’s seamless payments platform. Read more about the Stripe Partner Program here.

Upgraded Tax Calculation

ChargeDesk now supports more advanced tax calculations. We've made some signification changes to how tax calculations work behind the scenes. You can now set State or Province based sales tax rates from Setup > Sales Tax. On this page you can now also choose to automatically show tax imported from your payment gateway on invoices (where available). This ensures that tax shown at checkout to your customers will also always be shown on their invoices. For companies using complex tax calculations this means you no longer need to ensure you set tax rates on ChargeDesk which match those on your checkout software.

Email Delivery

We have upgraded our email delivery system to improve performance and provide deeper insights. This has resulted in better response times when performing actions which send emails. It has also enabled us to add email reporting under Reports > Email Delivery. This can help you double check your emails are being delivered correctly and understand any potential email delivery issues in your account.

Webhooks and Zapier

We've recently added beta support for webhooks. Webhooks allow you to receive programmatic notifications about events in your account, such as when a payment request is paid, or a customer makes their first payment. You can find our new webhook documentation here.

Adding webhooks has allowed allowed us to add beta support for Zapier. You can access the beta using this Zapier invite. We'd love to hear any feedback or feature requests for this integration!