Invite your first Customer

For customers to begin sharing data you first need to invite them to complete the Planky customer journey. The Planky invitation system provides a number of simple ways to do this.

Magic Links can be used by clients who do not have Planky integrated into their existing platform. The process involves generating a link to the Planky customer journey which is then sent to customers.

The AEIS allows you to quickly enter a customer’s basic details (name, email address) to auto-generate an invitation email which is then sent to the customer. The email contains a link to begin the Planky customer journey.

Planky’s API enables you to build an integrated invitation system within your existing software to automate the sending of customer invitations through your existing communication channels.

In the following documentation we will look at each of these in more detail.

Customers can be invited using either the AEIS or Magic Link method, both of which are accessible from the front page of Planky’s dashboard:

Also included on the Dashboard front page is a invitation status tracker which displays a summary of all invitations which have been sent.

Invitation status is assigned as follows:

Status	Description
	Email has been received and opened by the customer
	Email has been received but not opened by the customer
	The link contained within the email sent to the customer has expired

Planky’s AEIS enables you to invite customers by filling in a few basic fields. By following the steps shown, Planky will automatically generate and send a pre-populated email containing everything the customer needs to begin sharing data.

Once Invite has been clicked, an auto-generated email as shown below is sent to the customer.

The customer then begins the Planky customer journey by clicking the Share your bank accounts button.

The second way you can invite customers is via Magic Links. A Magic Link is a URL that links to the Planky customer journey and can be simply copied and pasted into an email and sent to the customer.

By following this Magic Link, the customer can “self-register” with Planky before beginning the customer journey. In other words, the link allows customers to accept an invitation and complete the data sharing process:

The advantage of the Magic Links method is that you can send a Magic Link to a list of customer email addresses rather than having to individually fill in the AEIS form for each customer invite.

Invitations can also be sent to customers using the Planky API. This allows you to fully automate the invitation process using existing communication channels (e.g. email, messenger apps such as Mailchimp, Facebook Messenger, etc. ).

Before proceeding, ensure that you have:

1. Set up your Planky user account
2. Obtained your client_id and client_secret API keys

The description below guides you through this process using Postman. First, navigate to the Postman Planky Production API page then click on the Run in Postman button in the top right hand corner of the screen.

The invitation functionality of the API is found in the Postman workspace menu under 8. Invitations.

Customer details such as name and email address are entered in standard json format, while the send_email field allows you to perform either of the following: