Take card payments on pest control invoices with Stripe

Card payments run on Stripe Connect, which means the account is yours: you complete Stripe’s own onboarding — business details, identity, bank account — on Stripe’s hosted flow, and the money from your invoices settles into your Stripe balance and out to your bank. Hunter is not a payment facilitator holding your takings.

Until that onboarding is genuinely finished, Hunter shows no "Pay now" button anywhere. Not on the invoice, not on the customer portal, not in an emailed chase. This is a deliberate rule rather than an accident of ordering, because the worst version of this feature is a customer clicking a pay link that leads to an error page, and then not paying at all. Setup is gated to owners and office users and requires an active paid plan.

The setup card in Hunter shows your status in plain English and, if Stripe still wants something, lists what — a document, a bank account, a director’s details — rather than showing you a raw requirements code. A refresh button re-checks with Stripe, and Stripe also notifies Hunter directly when your account status changes, so the pay links switch on as soon as you’re cleared. Hunter’s fee is a flat 2.7% of each amount charged, all-inclusive: Stripe’s own processing cost comes out of that, so there is no second fee and no fixed per-transaction component.

Sending an invoice issues a tokenised link on your own branded portal address, which is what goes into the email or SMS. Your customer doesn’t need an account, a password or an app. They open the link, see the invoice as you sent it, and press Pay now.

That takes them to Stripe’s own hosted checkout page for the outstanding balance in Australian dollars. Card details are entered on Stripe’s page, on Stripe’s infrastructure — they never pass through Hunter, and Hunter has nowhere to put a card number even if it wanted one. What Hunter stores is Stripe’s reference to the payment: an identifier, an amount, a fee, a net figure.

When the payment succeeds, Stripe tells Hunter over a signed webhook and the payment is recorded against the invoice: partially paid if it was a part payment, paid if it clears the balance, and any follow-up routine chasing that invoice stops immediately. Webhooks are signature-verified and deduplicated, so a retried delivery from Stripe can’t record the same payment twice.

The pay link is a bearer credential — anyone holding it can view and pay that invoice, which is exactly what makes it work in an SMS to a customer standing at their front door. Invoice links are long-lived by default so a link in an email from three weeks ago still works, and they can be rotated if a link ends up somewhere it shouldn’t. If you’d rather be paid by bank transfer, your payment instructions print on every invoice and PDF, and you record the payment in Hunter when it lands.

When a customer pays an invoice by card, the card can be kept on file with Stripe for next time. Hunter holds Stripe’s customer reference against the customer record; the card itself stays with Stripe.

Autopay is a per-customer setting, off by default. Turn it on for a commercial account on a monthly service agreement and Hunter charges the saved card when you send the invoice, so the invoice, the charge and the receipt are one action instead of three and a phone call. If the charge fails or the bank asks for authentication, the send still succeeds and the pay link still goes out — the customer simply pays it the normal way. Nothing about autopay is silent: the charge is recorded as a payment on the invoice like any other.

There is also a manual "Charge card on file" action on an invoice for the case where a customer says "just put it on the card you’ve got". Two honest limits: a card can only be saved from a payment the customer has already made, so a customer has to pay one invoice by card before autopay has anything to charge, and autopay fires on invoice send rather than on a schedule — Hunter does not retry a declined card in the background.

Refunds are issued from the invoice, in full or for a partial amount, and go back to the card that was charged. Hunter reverses the transfer and its own fee at the same time, so a refunded job doesn’t leave you out of pocket for a fee on money you no longer have.

Refunds are also connected to your credit notes, which is where most refunds actually originate. When you credit an invoice — a job that didn’t go ahead, a warranty callback, a billing error — you can tick "also refund to the customer’s card" and Hunter issues the refund alongside the credit note, capped at what was actually charged to the card. The credit note is what your ledger sees; the refund is what your customer sees.

Refunds issued directly in the Stripe dashboard flow back into Hunter too, recorded against the right invoice, so the two don’t disagree. One limitation worth stating: only card payments can be refunded to a card. A payment you recorded manually as cash or a bank transfer has no card to send money back to, so those are adjusted with a credit note and settled however you settled them originally.

Every card payment stores three numbers, not one: the gross amount, the fee, and the net that will actually reach your bank. That is what makes month-end reconcile. An invoice for $440 that arrives in your bank as $428.12 is not a mystery to chase; it is a $440 payment with a recorded fee.

If you use Xero or QuickBooks Online, you can go one step further. Map a merchant-fee expense account and Hunter books each processing fee to your ledger as its own transaction alongside the payment, so your bank reconciliation balances without a manual journal every month. It is opt-in and off until you map the account, and turning it on later doesn’t lose history — the fees were recorded against the payments all along.

Card payments are in Australian dollars, to an Australian Stripe account. There is no multi-currency support.

There is no BECS direct debit or pay-by-bank rail — bank transfers are handled by printing your payment instructions on the invoice and recording the payment when it arrives, not by debiting a customer’s account. Hunter does not set or influence your Stripe payout schedule; when funds land is between you and Stripe. Which payment methods appear at checkout is governed by your Stripe account settings rather than by anything Hunter configures.

Hunter does not store card numbers, and there is nowhere in the product that displays one. That is worth saying plainly because it is the single most common question on this page: the card is entered on Stripe’s hosted page and held by Stripe, and Hunter works entirely with Stripe’s references to it.