Services and splits overview

Many businesses collect money that is not all theirs. A school collects tuition and insurance. A licensing agency collects a fee that is shared with a federal body and an insurer. A marketplace collects an order and owes part of it to a seller. In each case the customer makes one payment, and the money has to reach several bank accounts in the right proportions. Vestrapay handles that division for you. You describe the arrangement once in the merchant dashboard. From then on, every payment that names it is allocated automatically and settled to the right accounts, with a record of exactly what went where. The dashboard pages for this are Services and Accounts. You work in the dashboard for the sandbox at merchant.sandbox.vestrapay.app and for live at merchant.vestrapay.com. The two environments are separate, so you set up each one on its own.

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The building blocks

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Services

A service is a named product or revenue stream that you collect money for. The Services page describes its purpose in one line: “Split transaction money between multiple bank accounts.” When you add a service, Vestrapay generates its service key from the title: lower case, with runs of other characters replaced by a dash. A service titled “Platform fee” gets the key platform-fee. If the key is already taken, a numeric suffix is added, as in platform-fee-2. The key appears on the service in the dashboard, and it is what a payment uses to refer to the service. Treat it as a stable identifier. Every merchant also has a default service. The default service cannot be disabled.

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Sub-accounts

A sub-account is a bank account in your pool of destinations. You add it under Accounts by choosing a bank and entering an account number. Vestrapay asks the bank for the account holder name, so the name is never typed by you. Once an account is in the pool, any number of services can use it.

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Splits

A split is a configured share of a service. A service’s splits say, for example, that 85% of every amount allocated to Tuition goes to one account and 15% to another. Each split has a title, such as FEDERAL GOVT, which appears as a tag on the settlement it produces. The shares on one service always add up to 100%.

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The primary settlement account

Your primary settlement account is the account you gave during KYB. It is shown under Accounts in the Primary Account section. It is never a split participant, because it already receives everything that is not allocated elsewhere: the remainder of every payment, and the whole of any payment that names no service. Think of it as the account that catches whatever the splits do not claim. If a service has no splits, the dashboard says so: “All revenue settles to your primary account”.

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How the pieces fit

The configuration is static, and you manage it in the dashboard: services, sub-accounts and splits. The allocation is per payment: the distribution that your server sends when it initialises a payment says how much of that particular payment goes to which service. The two are deliberately separate, so a fixed arrangement can serve payments of any size and mix.

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Setting it up

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Managing services

On the Services page you can add a service, edit its details and splits, and enable or disable it. The Services page does not offer a delete action, so plan service titles with that in mind.

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Disabling a service

Disabling a service stops new payments and new payment links from naming it. A payment that names a disabled service in its distribution is rejected. The configuration is kept, and payments that were initialised before you disabled it still credit their configured accounts. Existing collections and settlements are untouched. Enable the service again to resume. The dashboard asks you to confirm in a dialog before it enables or disables a service. The default service cannot be disabled.

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Where to go next