Migrate payment methods
This guide walks through moving your customers’ saved cards and bank accounts from your current payment processor to Tabs Pay. Payment methods transfer in the background and your customers don’t notice a change.
Tabs handles the transfer itself, so there’s nothing for you to build and no API to call. What’s asked of you is mostly working with your prior processor.
Before you begin
Your current processor controls how quickly this moves, and can take up to several weeks to fulfill an export request. Beginning well before you plan to go live means the transfer is ready when your Tabs Pay verification clears. You can work through the rest of the setup while you wait, and your current processor keeps charging customers normally throughout.
You’ll also want whoever owns the processor relationship at your company involved from the start, since they will originate the request.
Step 1: Request your payment data from your current processor
The stored payment data belongs to you rather than to Tabs, so your processor will only release it on your instruction, not to Tabs. The stored payment methods go directly to Adyen (Tabs Pay processing partner) securely.
If you’re on Stripe
Submit an export migration request through Stripe’s data migration request form, which you can reach from Stripe Support under Data Migrations. Open it while signed in to the Stripe account you’re migrating, and submit it as the Account Owner or as a user with the Data Migration Specialist role.
Answer the questions on the export request form:
Stripe opens an authenticated email thread once it receives the form, and the rest of the conversation happens there.
If you’re on another processor
Braintree, Fiserv, Versapay, NMI and others all have an equivalent process. Ask for an export of every stored payment method, and ask separately for your ACH authorizations, or “mandates” with the customer and payment method references attached.
One extra thing to plan for: processors other than Stripe don’t share a common customer identifier that Tabs can match on. Ask for whatever customer-level detail they can include—an email address, a billing address, a name—so each payment method can be matched to the right customer. Your Tabs contact can give you a field template to pass along, which saves a round trip when your processor asks what format Tabs needs.
Step 2: Pass along the transfer credentials
Your processor encrypts the export and uploads it to a secure server rather than sending it to you. You’ll receive credentials for that server—forward them to your Tabs contact and we take it from there.
Once the file is delivered, allow about two weeks for Tabs to receive the encrypted version from Adyen, load it, match your customers, and confirm the results with you. You’ll get a count of what transferred and what didn’t.
Step 3: Provide any authorizations you hold yourself
Cards transfer cleanly. ACH is the part worth planning for, because the bank account details and the authorization to debit that account travel separately.
If you’re on Stripe, Tabs can usually retrieve your authorization records directly if they are stored online. On any other processor you’ll need to ask for these and provide them to Tabs. And if any were collected outside your processor entirely—a signed form, an email, a clause in a service agreement—only you have them, so those need to come from you.
Each authorization has to be traceable to a specific customer and payment method. That link is what lets Tabs keep debiting a bank account after the switch, and it’s also your evidence if a customer later disputes a charge.
Step 4: Choose how to handle methods that can’t transfer
A few payment methods won’t come across: expired cards, bank accounts a customer added but never finished verifying, customers added after the initial migration, methods saved through Stripe Link, and methods saved through QuickBooks. Tabs gives you the list of affected customers, and you choose how to reach them. Either through a secondary migration or outreach.
Tabs can prompt each customer to re-enter their payment method the next time they open the customer payment portal to pay an invoice.
After the switch to Tabs Pay
Keep your old processor account open—disconnected from Tabs, but not closed—for ~4 months. Refunds and chargebacks on payments taken before the switch still run through it, and your historical records stay available there. After that you can close it, subject to whatever notice your contract requires.
Next steps
- Get your account ready—see Set up Tabs Pay
- Understand how a payment moves from authorization to payout—see Payment processing