Get a placement fee paid without chasing a bank transfer

A twelve thousand dollar permanent fee invoiced to a fifteen-person software company does not fail because the client is unwilling. It fails because paying it requires someone to open a banking portal, add a new payee, enter account details from a PDF and get a second approval, and that sequence slides down a founder's list for three weeks.

A link on the invoice removes four of those five steps. It will not change how an enterprise client with a procurement system and forty-five day terms behaves, and nobody should buy this expecting it to. It changes the small and mid-sized end of the client book, which for most agencies is where the ageing debtor list actually lives.

It also removes an argument. When a client says the invoice never arrived or that the bank details looked wrong, a link that was opened twice and abandoned tells you something a resent PDF does not. The event trail is not there to catch anyone out. It is there so the follow-up call starts from a fact rather than from a guess about what happened at the other end.

Taking a payment is easy. Knowing which placement it settled is the work. When a payment arrives with a reference like INV-2291 and the client paid two invoices in one transfer, someone has to open the ledger, match the amounts and update a spreadsheet, and that someone is usually the person who should be billing.

The build ties the payment event back to the invoice and the invoice back to the placement, so the placement record shows raised, sent, paid and when. That makes the two questions an owner asks answerable from the pipeline view: which placements are billed but unpaid, and how long has each been outstanding.

The connection authorises against your own Stripe account. Funds settle to your bank on your own schedule under your own agreement with Stripe. Surhires never holds client money, never becomes a party to the payment and takes no cut of a placement fee. Processing fees are between you and Stripe and we do not quote them, because they vary by country, method and negotiated rate.

This matters for a practical reason as well as a legal one. An agency that is considering whether card acceptance is worth it on a large permanent fee needs to make that calculation against its own rates. A CRM that presented a fee figure would be presenting a number it cannot stand behind.

Most agencies invoice on terms and get paid by transfer, and that continues to work. If you already have a Stripe account, you can create a payment link in Stripe yourself and paste it onto the invoice you send. Then record the payment date and reference against the placement in Surhires so the CRM knows the fee has landed.

The manual version is two minutes per invoice and it produces the same record the integration will produce automatically. Doing it now means the eventual sync inherits a clean history rather than starting from placements whose payment state has never been captured anywhere except a bank statement.

This is not contractor payouts. Paying a contractor is payroll or an employer-of-record arrangement, and Surhires is not an HRIS, a payroll system, a background-check provider or an assessment platform. It is recruitment software, and the boundary is the first invoice for a placement.

It is also not a dunning system, not a credit control workflow and not a subscription biller. It puts a link on an invoice and reconciles the resulting payment. If you need automated chase sequences and escalation ladders, that is your accounting system's job and it does it better than a CRM would.