Payment and Account Emails Don't Match

You have paid for an enCAST PRO subscription, but your account still shows as free, and you have had an email from us saying we could not match the payment. This page explains why that happens and how to put it right.

Why it happens #

When you subscribe, the payment is handled by Stripe or by Paddle. They tell us who paid by sending us the email address on the payment. We look that address up against the accounts on enCAST and upgrade the one that matches.

Sometimes there is nothing to match. The usual reasons are:

you paid through PayPal, and your PayPal address is different from your enCAST address;
you paid with a work or family address, and signed up with a personal one;
someone else paid for you, for example an agent or a parent;
you have changed your email address with the payment provider since you signed up;
there is a typo in one of the two addresses.

In every one of those cases the payment is completely fine. Your subscription is live, and we can see it at the payment provider. What we cannot do is guess which enCAST account it belongs to, and we will not attach a payment to an account on a guess.

What we need from you #

We need you to tell us, from inside your own account, which payment address is yours. That is the part that proves the account is yours: anybody can claim a payment by email, but only you can log in as you.

So please:

Log in to your enCAST account, the one you want upgraded.
Go to the contact form. If you already have a conversation with us in your enCAST inbox, you can reply there instead.
Give us these details:
- the email address of your enCAST account (the one you are logged in with);
- the email address you paid from, in full. Copy it exactly. It is printed in the email we sent you;
- the date and amount of the payment;
- the invoice or receipt PDF from Stripe or Paddle, if you have it. This is optional, but it lets us find the payment straight away.

You do not need to send us anything from your bank. Never send us your card number, and never send it to anyone claiming to be us. We will never ask you for it.

What happens then #

This fix is done by a person, not automatically. We match your message to the payment by hand, record the payment address on your account so it is recognised automatically from then on, including at renewal, and switch you to PRO.

We normally do this by the next working day. If you write at the weekend, expect it on Monday. You will not lose any of the time you have paid for: your subscription period runs from the payment, not from the moment we link it.

Once we have made the change, it appears on the site immediately. There is no need to log out and back in.

Please do not do these things #

Do not pay again. A second payment will not fix it. It is very likely to fail in exactly the same way, and then we have two payments to unpick and refund.
Do not cancel the subscription. It is working. Cancelling it removes the very thing we are trying to attach to your account.
Do not create a second account using the payment address. That splits your profile in two, and merging accounts afterwards is far more work than linking a payment.

If you cannot log in #

If you have lost access to the account, use forgot your password first. If that does not get you in, for example because you no longer have the mailbox you signed up with, reply to the email we sent you and tell us as much as you can: the payment address, the address you think you signed up with, your name as it appears on your profile, and the date and amount of the payment. We will take it from there.

If you did not intend to pay, or you paid for the wrong account, write to us the same way and say so. We will sort out a refund or move the subscription to the right account.

If you already have two profiles #

If paying from another address has left you with a second enCAST profile, we can merge the two into one.

Log in to the profile you want to keep.
Go to the contact form.
Tell us both email addresses, and which of the two profiles you want to keep.

The profile you keep stays exactly as it is: same login, same profile address. Everything from the other profile is added to it, including photos, CVs, languages, credits and applications. Nothing is lost, and anyone who follows a link to the old profile is taken to the one you kept.

Messages are not moved across. Before we merge, copy anything you need from the Messages inbox of the profile that is closing.

Afterwards, the address you paid from can stay different from your login address. We record it on your account so that renewals are recognised automatically.

If you are paying for two subscriptions #

If each profile has its own subscription, you are paying twice. Tell us in the same message and we cancel one of them and refund it. If it has already been running for a while, the refund covers the unused part.

We have to do this before we can merge the two profiles, so please do not cancel either subscription yourself. We will tell you which one we are keeping.

If you simply want to log in with a different address, you can change it yourself:

Go to Edit your profile and open the Account tab.
Under your email address, click the link to change it.
Enter your current password and your new address twice.
We send a confirmation link to the new address. Click it within one hour to finish the change.

You cannot change to an address that another enCAST account already uses, including as a payment address. If that happens, the address belongs to your other profile, so ask us to merge the two instead.