The life of a payment

2.1

Five records

Five records hold every payment, and each keeps only its own facts:

• The order — what is bought, by whom, what was picked, and how its money is distributed.
• The invoice — the amount to pay: how much, by when, and how much is still due.
• The attempt — one try to pay, from the choice of an instrument to the funds secured.
• The payment — the money secured and its life after: capture, refunds, disputes, settlement.
• The settlement batch — what an acquirer settled for a day, what the company recorded, and what the bank credited.

The records share one vocabulary of facts and nothing else: a fact is written only into the record that owns it, and any record may read it. That is why a payment can be followed from end to end without a second system.

2.2

The stages of an attempt

• Source — An invoice is in front of a payer.
• Choice — The payer chooses an instrument.
• Screening — Risk and AML rules look at the attempt.
• Routing — The unit’s strategy and rules choose the acquirer — by approval, by cost, on-us — and every alternative is recorded.
• Consent — The payer gives their word: 3-D Secure, a bank app, a scan, a mandate.
• Secured — The funds are held or have arrived.
• Capture — The money is taken: unpaid becomes paid.
• Distribution — Every share to its recipient — the unit, the acquirer’s fee, sellers — balanced in the ledger.
• Mouth — Paid: a receipt for the payer, the attempt closed.

2.3

Capture after picking

A grocery basket is not known exactly when it is paid for: weighed goods weigh what they weigh, and items are missing or replaced. So the card is authorised for the estimated basket and the money is held; the order system reports what was picked; the invoice is adjusted; the platform captures that amount, less any bonus points, and releases the rest of the hold.

An instrument that cannot hold money, such as a transfer or a QR payment, is paid in full first, and the difference is refunded after picking.

2.4

After the payment

A payment lives on in its own record: refunds and disputes take money back, and the bank settles what remains. Where the banks settle to the company directly, the platform pays nothing out; it follows each payment into its bank’s settlement batch and reconciles the batch.

2.5

Rebuilt from the record

No view is written by hand. Replaying the facts in order gives exactly the views the cabinets read, and the ledger balances because it is computed from the division of each payment. The demo’s history is itself such a replay, run when the stand starts.

A webhook carries the identifier of one fact, so a receiving system can drop a duplicate, and every fact a system received can be found on the attempt’s page.