Using Checkout for ongoing monthly donations

Jeremie Wood

Hi, I am working for a client that would like to use Blackbaud Checkout to capture credit cards for ongoing monthly donations. I would just like to make sure that I understand how the different pieces fit together though before I proceed.

Here’s how I understand it at the moment:

• We use Checkout’s Blackbaud_OpenPaymentForm() to capture the credit card number and charge the donor their first payment. After calling the Checkout transaction endpoint with the token we received, this gives us a checkout_transaction_id which we can pass on to the Gift creation API.
• We create a Gift, adding the amount and recurring gift schedule. To that we attach a single payments object which contains the checkout_transaction_id from step 1. The system will then schedule all future payments at the appropriate times using the credit card the donor used for their first payment.

Is that about right? Thanks for your help.

Amanda Glosson

There is one more property you will need to add to the payments object on your recurring gift record. You will need to provide the account_token property. This represents the card information which checkout would have stored. When you use checkout with the Blackbaud_OpenPaymentForm be sure to add the card_token property so that the card information will be stored using the GUID you provide. The card_token you provide to checkout would then also be sent on the gift record as the account_token.

Everything else you've described is an accurate understanding of how to interact with checkout and the gifts API.