How to set up CSA payments: recurring card charges without the spreadsheet

The shape of a CSA payment

A CSA payment is a subscription: a member agrees to a share for a season and pays for it either up front or on a schedule. The schedule version — weekly, every two weeks, or monthly — is what most farms move to once they have software, because it lowers the price of joining from several hundred dollars to the price of a week, and it spreads the farm's income across the season instead of front-loading it in February.

Cards on file, charged on a schedule

The mechanism is simple. At sign-up the member enters a card once. The card is stored by the payment processor (Stripe, in Clementine's case — the farm never sees the number). On the schedule you set, the software charges the card, emails a receipt, and the money moves to the farm's bank account. For a Tuesday pickup that might be a Sunday charge; the member sees a small, predictable line on their statement every week instead of one large one.

Deposits with Stripe typically arrive two business days after the charge. There is no invoice to send, no transfer to initiate, and no reconciliation between "who paid" and "who's on the list" because they are the same record.

What it costs to take cards

Card processing is 2.9% plus 30 cents per successful charge, and that rate is the same whether you use Clementine, Local Line, Barn2Door, or a Stripe account on its own. On a $38 weekly share that is $1.40, leaving $36.60 in the bank. On a $600 season paid at once it is $17.70. Weekly charging costs slightly more in processing over a season than one up-front charge because of the 30-cent per-charge part — about $8 more on a 20-week $38 share — and most farms take that trade for the lower barrier to joining.

What differs between tools is what sits on top of processing. Percentage-based platforms add 2% to 7% of every payment; flat-fee tools add nothing per payment. The pricing guide works the numbers.

Skips, pauses, cancels, and refunds

A member traveling for two weeks marks a skip before your cutoff; that week's charge doesn't run and they drop off that week's pack-out list. A member who needs to pause for the summer pauses; charges stop until they resume. A cancel stops future charges and leaves the paid weeks alone. A refund is one click against a specific charge and goes back to the same card. In Clementine every one of these is something the member can do themselves from their subscription page, which is what keeps the "can I skip next week?" emails out of your inbox.

When a card fails

Cards expire and get replaced. A good system retries the charge on a schedule, emails the member a link to update the card, and shows you the failure on the members list until it clears. What it should not do is silently drop the member or silently keep packing a box nobody has paid for. The pack-out list should reflect payment status the morning of delivery.

Setting it up

Connect a Stripe account (about ten minutes: business details, bank account), create your share sizes with prices and a charge cadence, publish the sign-up page, and share the link. From there members add themselves. In Clementine I do the connect-and-configure step with you; the sign-up page guide covers what the page itself needs.