SmartCentral supports a variety of payment integration options which you can use depending upon your needs. SmartCentral can act as origin for charges sending to an external system or as a collector receiving amounts to be paid (invoices) from a third party system that then get transferred to the parents’ SmartCentral account.
For most services this is the simplest and most comprehensive solution. SmartCentral’s fully integrated payment gateway solution is PCI compliant and supports a full end to end online process from registration through to billing and payments. Payment amounts are calculated according to billing rules and automatically reconciled onto parent accounts depending on the success or failure of the transaction.
For services that need to use an alternative payments process, SmartCentral can export a payments file CSV. This file can use an external customer / parent ID that must match with your external payment system. Payment amounts are processed through the billing rules engine so can take into account fixed, capped or variable parent payment settings.
An exported payment file must be cleared onto the parent accounts through the manual clearing process. This handles any failed payments.
For services that have parents making direct deposits into a nominated bank account, SmartCentral supports the option to accept a payment file import csv. The file is assumed to contain only cleared transactions and is immediately processed onto the parent account.
The payments api allows an external system to read the parents’ current balances as at a date and post payment transactions. Payments are assumed to be cleared funds and are immediately cleared onto the parents’ accounts.
Generally the external system would take responsibility for posting any reversals if required but reversals can also be applied manually by the centre administrator.