QuickBooks Payments: "We Can't Turn On Payments for You."

What to do when QuickBooks Payments denies your organization.

Pete Zimek, CAE avatar
Written by Pete Zimek, CAE
Updated over a week ago

The Novi team chose QuickBooks Payments as our primary payment processing provider because the integration between QuickBooks and QuickBooks Payments is deep and seamless.  Bookkeepers love the way that deposit records are automatically created, and members enjoy being able to click to pay directly from an invoice. 

Most importantly, we've seen countless hours of busy work and scores of workarounds vanish from the desks of bookkeepers thanks to the way that the two systems communicate. For this reason, we continue to recommend the solution to our clients and even list it as a technical requirement for Novi AMS.

Understanding the Approval Process for QuickBooks Payments

If you're reading this article, you probably received an email that looked like this...

Over the last year, we have found that QuickBooks Payments has one of the most conservative approval processes in the credit card payment industry.  Their underwriting procedures are setup to deny any company that they believe could be a risk, knowing that they will turn down a significant number of perfectly legitimate, low risk businesses.  

Roughly 10% of our customers receive a denial letter when setting up their account.  Of that group, roughly half have been able to appeal through QuickBooks and are eventually approved.  A handful are never approved.

The aggressive underwriting practices of QuickBooks Payments is a subject that the Novi team has addressed with a number of different departments within Intuit.  For us, it has been hard to understand why associations or chambers of commerce are rejected - you are the voices of the very small and medium businesses that Intuit centers its business around. Many of the Intuit team members with whom we have spoken - some being very high in their company - understand this frustration and have spoken out internally in support of 501(c)6 organizations.  In some cases, this has resulted in organizations being re-evaluated and eventually approved.  However, we still see firm rejections from time to time.

Stripe: The Alternative to QuickBooks Payments

For the handful of Novi clients who are not approved, we have added Stripe as a payment processor.  Used by companies like Lyft and Target as well as organizations including the Girl Scouts and Habitat for Humanity, Stripe is very well established and respected as a payment solution.  

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