How to

How to accept Zelle® on your invoices

Some of your members will not mail a check and will not pay a card fee. Zelle is already in their banking app, and your business account is already enrolled with it. This puts the two together on the invoice: three lines of instructions, the email to send to, and a code to scan. You set it up once. It then prints on every invoice.

You do not need a QR image from your bank, and BasicBMS does not need to know which bank you use.

Before you start

  • Your business account is enrolled with Zelle at your bank, and you know the email or US phone number it is enrolled under and the name it is enrolled as. That is all BasicBMS needs.
  • One Zelle email or phone number can be enrolled at one bank at a time. If you have just moved banks and the new app rejects your email or number, it is still enrolled at the old bank. Remove it there first.
  • You can edit Company Settings (a settings administrator).
  • The invoice layout includes the Zelle® Payment block. The standard invoice layouts do.

Steps

  1. Open Company Settings. Under Select Type choose Zelle and search, so you can see any rows already there. Each setting is one row: a Type, a Name, and a Value.

  2. Click Add New Setting. Set Type to Zelle, Name to IsActive, Value to true. Click Save.

  3. Add another row: Name Email, Value the email enrolled with Zelle. If the account is enrolled by phone instead, use Name PhoneNumber and that US number. Email is preferred — it is what a member will type from a desktop. Click Save.

  4. Add a third row: Name DisplayName, Value the name enrolled with Zelle, exactly as your bank shows it. This is the name a member’s app displays before they confirm the payment. Click Save.

    BasicBMS Company Settings filtered to the Zelle type, showing the DisplayName, Email, IsActive and PhoneNumber rows filled in and the QRCodeData row empty.
    The whole configuration. Nothing here is a secret — it is the same email and name printed on every invoice. Rows named PaymentLink and QRCodeUrl may also appear from an earlier version; the invoice ignores them, so leave them empty.

  5. Open any invoice. The Zelle® Payment block now shows the instructions, your email, and the code. There is nothing else to configure and no image to upload.

    Zelle® Payment

    Pay by Zelle® — no fees, no check to mail.

    Send to: billing@yourcompany.com (shows as Your Company Name)

    Include your account number or service address in the memo.

    BasicBMS invoice footer showing the Check Payment, Zelle Payment and Stripe Payment blocks side by side; the Zelle block carries the instructions, the enrolled email and a QR code generated by BasicBMS.
    The whole feature in one frame. The code is drawn by BasicBMS from the email and name in Company Settings — nothing on this block came from the bank.

  6. Check it before it goes on paper. Open the invoice on screen and scan the code with a banking app’s Zelle scanner — a personal account is fine; you are not sending anything. The app should show your display name and ask for an amount. That is the test.

A fourth row, Name QRCodeData, is optional and almost nobody needs it. If your bank hands you a QR image and you would rather print theirs, paste the SVG as its Value and it is used instead of the generated code.

What posts behind it

Nothing. This is invoice presentation. The payment is recorded when your bookkeeper matches it in bank reconciliation, exactly like a check — and the memo line is what makes that match easy, which is why the invoice tells the member to fill it in.

When it won’t let you

There are no refusal messages here — the settings are plain key/value rows, and the failure modes are quiet. So, if you don’t see what you expect:

The block is not on the invoice at all. IsActive is not true, or none of Email, PhoneNumber or QRCodeData is filled in. The block hides itself entirely — heading included — rather than print an empty box next to the Check Payment block. In the form builder it always shows, and in place of the code it carries its own setup instructions under the heading Zelle Payment Not Configured.

The code scans but shows the wrong name, or “recipient not found”. The email or phone is not the one enrolled with Zelle — or it is still enrolled at a previous bank. Fix it at the bank, not in BasicBMS.

A banking app refuses the code. Zelle does not publish the code format; BasicBMS generates the same link the banks’ own apps do, and this has not happened. If it ever does, paste your bank’s own QR image into QRCodeData — it takes precedence over the generated code.

Unable to load Zelle settings The settings call failed while the invoice was loading. Reload the invoice; if it persists, the API is unreachable and the problem is not your settings.

What this doesn’t do

The code identifies you, not the bill. There is no amount in it and no memo — the member types both. Do not expect “scan and the bill is paid.”

BasicBMS does not see Zelle payments arrive. Nothing talks to Zelle. The payment is recorded when the bookkeeper matches it in reconciliation, same as a check.

This is not a Zelle partnership and not a certified code — it is the same public link every bank’s “My QR code” contains, built from your settings.

The block prints wherever the invoice layout places it; today that is the invoice footer, on screen and in the mailed PDF at about an inch square. Zelle is a US network, so the phone option takes a US number. Zelle is free to the member and free in BasicBMS — that is a fact about Zelle, not a feature.

Related

Stuck on this one? Call (509) 949-2162 and we’ll walk through it with you.

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