GoCardless fees not sent by GC so not recorded in CiviCRM

[TomCrawshaw]

I'm getting payments being updated in Civi as Completed, and all seems well except that the GoCardless fee is not being updated in Civi - the Fee Amount is 0.00 and the Net Amount is the same as the amount donated. Is this as expected?

[TomCrawshaw]

Update. I got the following from GoCardless, which explains why Fee & Net Amount are not being set correctly:

"At present we don't provide fee information through the API, either via webhooks or against payment resources.

I do believe that adding a Fees endpoint is in discussion, so I'll pass your feedback on. At present, you'd need to calculate locally using the payment amount. "

Making this calculation is quite easy, but there is no neat way to set the fee calculation except by modifying Webhook.php case by case - any plans to change this?

[artfulrobot]

Hi Tom,

I don't have a plan to change this as I don't need it :-) and implementing code for a particular pricing structure adds a further thing that can break in future if/when they change things - e.g. if GC introduced a premium account with different fees users of this extension might expect it to know about this. I think it's safer to wait until GC actually tell us what fees they've taken, then develop the feature to record that in CiviCRM.

Rich

[TomCrawshaw]

Rich Fair enough! Although I’m surprised you don’t need the fee recorded on Civi, as without this your accounts will be wrong… if you are using the accounts of course. For now, I’ll put in a local shim, and look forward to GC adding this to their feed. Tom

…

On 11 Jul 2017, at 18:14, Rich Lott ***@***.***> wrote: Hi Tom, I don't have a plan to change this as I don't need it :-) and implementing code for a particular pricing structure adds a further thing that can break in future if/when they change things - e.g. if GC introduced a premium account with different fees users of this extension might expect it to know about this. I think it's safer to wait until GC actually tell us what fees they've taken, then develop the feature to record that in CiviCRM. Rich — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#19 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AOLKTSWSIexweX4NGJb0tAOWtYKTpw8Vks5sM62KgaJpZM4OQFbH>.

[artfulrobot]

Yeah, the clients of mine who use this don't use CiviCRM for their accounts (in fact there's often a bit of tension between finance types and CRM types in terms of who has the authoritative data!), so they just need to know the gross income, but I take your point. PRs welcome :-)

[artfulrobot]

Just to note: shortly after musing that GC might change their pricing structure, they did, for new clients. So now we genuinely can't tell what fees were taken until the API tells us this.

[artfulrobot]

I think GoCardless might now include transaction fees in the data they hold on payments, so this becomes a possibility.

Actually, while you can access this from the GC website, it seems they have not made this available in their API model

They had this to say on the matter to someone else. Hints that there may be a backwards after-the-event way of adding the information in via a payout hook. This means your net income in CiviCRM will go up and then down! Hmm, not very satisfactory.

[aydun]

In the thread @artfulrobot referenced someone has posted code to get the fees from a 'paid out' event webhook. As I read it, GC are saying the actual fee is complicated and not known until it is paid out, but even then, refunds need handling as there are many types of PayoutItem

It looks like we could update the fees for the majority of payments but some more esoteric situations could add a lot of complexity.

[artfulrobot]

@aydun yes. We could implement the webhook to catch payments that change status to paid out (I think that's a thing), and then it could try to fetch/calculate the fees and update the contribution accordingly. There'd still be a lag, but the whole GC thing is very laggy anyway (i.e. 'pending' initial contribs for 5 working days), much to the annoyance of fundraisers everywhere!

PRs welcome.