Your clinic's own card, not a patient processor
It's easy to see "Clinic Payment Methods" in Settings and assume it's related to how patients pay you. It isn't. The Clinic Payment Methods page (/settings/saved-payments) manages the card your clinic itself is charged on — the one that pays for your own ClinyPal account. Nothing here touches how a patient settles their invoice; that's covered by Payment Types (Settings) and Recording Payments instead.
- What you see before and after saving your first card
- How the Default badge and Set default button behave
- How an expired card is flagged, and why it matters for two different bills at once
- Adding a card through the 2-step modal
- Reading the transaction history below the card list
Before and after your first card
Until your clinic saves a card, the page shows a plain empty state with an Add your first card call to action — there's no card list to speak of yet, since there's nothing to list. The moment a card is saved, the page switches permanently to the card-list view; there's no way back to the empty state short of removing every saved card.
Reading the card list: default and expired states
If your clinic saves more than one card, exactly one of them is the default — the card actually charged for subscription renewals and SMS top-ups. The list makes this unambiguous rather than something you have to infer.
| What you see | What it means | When it appears |
|---|---|---|
| <strong>Default</strong> badge | This is the card currently billed for both subscription and SMS top-ups. | Only on the one card that's currently default. |
| <strong>Set default</strong> button | Promotes a different saved card to be the one billed going forward. | On every card <em>except</em> the current default — a card that's already default has nothing to set. |
| <strong>Expired</strong> badge, red expiry text | The card's expiry date has passed and it can no longer be charged. | Only once a saved card's expiry date is in the past. |
Adding a card
Adding a card is a small, two-step modal rather than a single form: a Form step for entering the card, and a Success step confirming it saved. The header, body, and footer all change between the two steps — it's not just the body content swapping while the frame stays the same, so don't expect the same submit button to still be there once you've moved past it.
Open the add-card modal
Click <strong>Add your first card</strong> if the list is empty, or <strong>Add card</strong> from an existing card list.
Enter card details (Form step)
Fill in your card details using the embedded Stripe card element.
Submit the card
Click the submit action in the modal's footer to save the card.
Confirm (Success step)
The modal switches entirely to its Success step, confirming the card was saved. Close it to return to the card list, where the new card now appears.
Transaction history
Below the card list, a transaction history section lists past charges to your clinic's card — subscription renewals and SMS credit top-ups sit in the same list together, since they're billed to the same card. This is usually the fastest place to check whether a specific charge actually went through, rather than waiting on a billing email or bank statement.
Where else this same card comes up
Because this is one card doing two jobs, you'll run into it again from two different angles elsewhere in ClinyPal. SMS Settings is where you configure auto top-up and low-balance behavior for SMS credit — the actual charge for a top-up lands on the card managed here. A future Subscription & Billing article will cover how your plan itself is billed, again against this same saved card.