Process in-person payments

In a platform setup, you can onboard your users with point-of-sale integrations to accept in-person payments (IPP).

After you configured the payment methods for the merchant accounts or stores in your platform, your users can start accepting payments from their customers. To make sure that the pay-in, settlement, and payout processes run smoothly, you must book the incoming funds and fees to the correct balance accounts. This means that in each individual payment, capture, and refund request that you send on behalf of your users, you have to include information on how to split the funds between your user's balance accounts and your platform's liable balance account.

In your requests, you can include instructions to which balance account to book:

• Payments for the goods or services
• Refunds
• Fees incurred by transactions
• Tips (gratuity)
• Surcharges

Your platform's commission is always booked to your liable balance account.

Before you begin

To process in-person payments for your user, you must:

• Ensure that your server can receive and accept webhooks.
• Have access to the API credentials for the Management API.
• Design and set up your in-person payments integration:
  • Choose the payment terminal models you want to use.
  • Choose between cloud or local communications and build your cloud integration or local integration.
  • Configure the in-store network.
  • Implement the payment flow with Terminal API.
  • Order, assign, and configure payment terminals.

Splitting transactions

Transactions processed through Adyen need to be split between the balance accounts in your platform: your liable balance account and your users' balance accounts. You must send the split instructions with every payment, capture, or refund request.

You can split funds into any number of balance accounts in your platform. For example, when a customer pays, you can split the funds into:

• The sale amount, which goes to your user's balance account.
• Your platform's commission, which goes to your platform's liable account.
• The transaction fees, which can be charged to your user's balance account.
• The remainder after currency conversion, which can be booked to your user's balance account.

If you do not provide any split information, the whole transaction is booked to your platform's liable balance account, including all associated fees.

You can also configure automatic splits instead of sending the split information with every request. In this case, Adyen evaluates the rules in the split configuration for all the transactions processed through the store or merchant account it is applied to. If you need to change the split information for specific transactions, you can send split data in the payment or capture API request. Any split data that you send through the API overrides the automatic split.

Validating split information

The API that you use for your payment, capture, or refund request, validates only the format of the split data, not the balance accounts specified in the request. This means that even if the payment, capture, and refund is successful, it is possible that the funds are not credited to/deducted from the specified balance account. If the balance account does not exist, or it is linked to an account holder with a closed status, the full transaction (sale amount, commission, and fees) is booked to your platform's liable balance account.

To correct the balances, you can transfer the funds between the balance accounts in your platform.

Transaction fees

Transaction fees refer to the costs you incur on a transaction in your platform, which are not known at the time of payment. They are calculated by Adyen after we receive the payment request. Transaction fees include Interchange and Scheme fees, as well as Adyen's Commission and Markup.

By default, all transaction fees are deducted from your liable balance account. However, you can also book them, together or individually, directly to the balance accounts of your user. This eliminates the need to settle the balances later by transferring funds between balance accounts.

For more information, see Transaction fees.

Surcharge

Some payment methods, such as card schemes and debit network providers, charge a fee for accepting payments on their payment network, called a payment acceptance fee. As a platform, you must have agreements in place with your users about how the payment acceptance fee is charged for each payment. If they choose to, your users can pass on these costs to their customers by adding a surcharge to their payments.

For more information, see Surcharge.

Tipping

When a customer includes a tip in their payment to your user, the tip amount is booked to your liable account by default. However, you can book the tips directly to your user's balance account by providing an additional split item in the payment request.

For more information, see Tipping.