With the Pronamic Pay plugin, we do everything we can to make the payment process as smooth as possible. We listen to our users and try to translate this into our plugin. An important component of a well-organised administration is the payment description, which helps to retrieve transactions easily.
A payment description is a description attached to a payment transaction to identify it. At Mollie, for example, this description appears on the dashboard under ‘Payments’. It provides clarity and helps to identify and categorise payments easily.
Tips for a good payment description
A good payment description helps with accounting. It makes it easier to match payments with invoices or orders, saving time in administration. How you build your payment description is an individual choice, but there are some things you can keep in mind.
There is often a limit to the number of characters that can be displayed in a payment description. Therefore, keep the payment description short and clear. Make sure the most important information fits within this limit.
In addition, make sure the description tells what the payment is for. For example, add variables such as an order or invoice number. This can help identify payments specifically.
Payment descriptions in WooCommerce
When using Pronamic Pay, you can set the payment description yourself. Here, you can choose a fixed description, or dynamic descriptions that, for example, automatically include the order number. A Mollie payment description can be set per payment method. For example, you can choose to use a different description for Credit Card than for iDEAL.
Using variables, you can build the payment description yourself. You add the order number by using the {order_number} variable. Other useful variables are {order_date} and {blogname}. Since Pronamic Pay version 9.6, a new variable is available, namely {payment_lines_name}.
Items in the payment description with {payment_lines_name}
The Nij Smellinghe hospital’s staff association uses Pronamic Pay. Within a WooCommerce environment, staff can register for various activities. Think of the Saint Nicholas party or an outing to a Christmas market in Germany. Payments are made with Mollie. The technical link between Mollie and WooCommerce is made by Pronamic Pay.
The payments are in Mollie’s dashboard. Since many activities have the same price, it is difficult to identify which activity a payment was made for based on price. Also, the order number is not very telling in this case. Here, you would prefer to see the titles of the products ordered directly in the payment description. And this is possible with Pronamic Pay. With the {payment_lines_name} tag, the titles of all ordered products are included in the description.
In Nij Smellinghe’s case, we use the following payment description Order #{order_number} - {payment_lines_name}. The maximum length of the payment description is 255 characters. For longer values, the description will be truncated. Thus, when ordering multiple products, there is a chance that this cannot be included in entire description.
The available variables give total freedom in the construction of the payment description. Do you also want full control over the payment description? Then choose Pronamic Pay.
