Using Multiple Payment Providers

IntakeQ has limited support for using multiple payment providers under the same clinic account. Each provider has the ability to override the clinic payment settings and connect to their own Stripe or Square account. However, this feature is typically not compatible with clinics where clients are shared among multiple practitioners.

This limitation occurs because each client in IntakeQ can only be linked to one payment provider account. Let's look at an example that could cause issues when a client is shared with more than one practitioner.

Let's say Practitioner A and Practitioner B have linked their own Stripe account to IntakeQ. Jane, a new client, books her first appointment with Practitioner A and enters her credit card information upon booking. IntakeQ stores Jane's credit card information in Practitioner A's Stripe account. At that time, IntakeQ cannot store that information under any other Stripe account due to a technical limitation (the card's security token can only be used once).

Since Jane was originally created under Practitioner A, when it's time to bill the client, IntakeQ will pull credit cards from Practitioner A's Stripe account. This will work without any problems. Now let's say Jane books a new appointment, this time with Practitioner B. One might expect that Practitioner B will receive the funds of that appointment under their own Stripe account. However, Jane's credit card information is only stored in Practitioner A's Stripe account, so Practitioner B will not be able to bill Jane under their own account unless Jane's ownership is changed to Practitioner B and Jane enters her credit card information again via an invoice, consent form or booking widget.

Moreover, a client in IntakeQ can only be linked to one payment provider at a time, so even if Jane enters her card information for multiple practitioners, someone will have to keep changing her ownership, which will generate a lot of admin overhead.

Possible Solutions

1. The easiest way to overcome this issue is to rethink the decision of linking multiple payment providers under the same clinic. We have thousands of clients and only a very small minority use a different payment provider for each practitioner. This data point suggests that this is not a common business practice.

If a practitioner is independent enough that their generated revenue goes directly to their Stripe/Square account, perhaps it's worth asking whether it's better for them to have a separate IntakeQ account.

2. Disabling client sharing in your clinic account would solve the credit card issue, because when a client books with a different practitioner, a new client record is created under another practitioner. This option comes at a cost since providing shared care for that patient would be tricky. So please consider whether this would make sense for your clinic.