"Accept card payments" is one checkbox on most invoicing tools' feature lists. Behind it sit at least three quite different arrangements for where your customer's money goes, who can see it, and what happens to it the day you stop using the tool.
None of them is a scam and all of them are legal. They are just different, and you should know which one you are signing up for before you have six months of payment history inside it.
The three set-ups
1. The tool is your payment processor. You apply for a merchant account with the invoicing company itself. QuickBooks Payments, Square and PayPal work this way: the company that sends your invoice is also the company that moves the money, sets the rates and handles disputes. Leaving the invoicing tool usually means leaving the processor too.
2. The tool opens a lightweight account for you on its own platform. Many software companies use a payment platform such as Stripe Connect to give each customer a small payment account of their own, managed through the software. You get a simplified dashboard — payouts, a few settings — and the software company configures the rest: which payment methods appear, often what you're charged, sometimes when you're paid out.
3. You connect your own full processor account. You have a complete Stripe account in your own name. The invoicing tool asks permission to create payments on it, and that's all. You log in to Stripe directly, see every payment, set your own payouts and keep the account if you leave.
What actually differs
Whose dashboard you see. In set-up 3 you have the processor's full dashboard: every charge, refund, dispute and payout. In set-up 2 you see what the software chooses to expose. In set-up 1 you see the invoicing company's own payments area.
Who sets the price. With your own account, the processor bills you its published rate and the software can only add an explicit fee on top, which shows up as a separate line. With a platform-managed account, the software company often pays the processor and bills you a single blended rate, so you can't see where the processor's price ends and the platform's begins.
Who handles a dispute. When a customer disputes a card charge, someone has to answer it. On your own account, the dispute comes to you, in the processor's dashboard, with its evidence tools. On a platform account, it may be routed through the software.
What happens if you leave. This is the one people find out about too late. With your own processor account, switching invoicing tools means disconnecting one app — your account, your customers' saved payment history and your payout settings stay exactly where they are. With the other two, leaving the software can mean opening a new payment account somewhere else and starting over.
Who carries the risk. Somebody is on the hook if an account ends up with a negative balance — a refund or dispute larger than the money left in it. On your own account that is a matter between you and the processor. On a platform account the software company may carry part of it, which is one reason platforms keep more control.
Questions to ask before you connect anything
- Will I have my own account with the processor, or an account inside yours?
- Can I log in to the processor directly, without going through your software?
- What do you add on top of the processor's own rate — and is it a separate line?
- If I cancel, what happens to my payment account and my payment history?
A vendor who can't answer the last one in a sentence is telling you something.
Where we land
ScanThisText uses set-up 3. When you connect Stripe, you get a full Stripe account in your own name: you log in at stripe.com, Stripe bills you its standard rates directly, and we add 0% to anything your customers pay. Invoices are paid on a Stripe page under your business name, and the money settles into your account. If you leave us, you disconnect one app and your Stripe account carries on.
(Accounts connected before October 2026 were the lighter, platform-managed kind. They keep working as they are; new connections are full accounts.)
Every account can send three invoices a month on its own Stripe account. Start free.
