Reaching the payment and invoice records inside Paysley Merchant

Every payment a Paysley merchant takes — virtual terminal, a texted or emailed link, a Scan & Pay QR code, or a Bluetooth card reader running swipe, EMV, and tap — lands in the same cloud account the mobile app mirrors. Paysley describes the phone app as an extension of its cloud desktop platform, with all activity auto-synced both ways. For anyone trying to get that activity into a ledger, a reconciliation job, or a CRM, the practical question is not what the screen shows but how to read the server behind it on a schedule. That is the work below.

Bottom line: the records worth integrating are merchant-owned and already centralized server-side, so the dependable route is to read that account under the merchant's own authorization rather than scrape a device. We map the request and auth chain the mobile client uses against its backend, then hand you source that reproduces the calls you care about. Card data stays out of scope of storage by design.

What Paysley keeps, and where it comes from

The domains below are drawn from Paysley's own feature description and its public product and support pages. Each row is a surface an integrator would actually query.

Three routes that fit this account

Authorized interface integration (the one we lead with here)

The mobile app and the desktop platform share one backend, and the request/auth pattern is consistent enough to replay programmatically once mapped. We trace the calls under your authorization, pin the auth scheme and hosts, and build a client that pulls payments, invoices, customers, and inventory on the cadence you set. Reachable: effectively everything the synced account exposes. Effort: moderate. Durability: good while the backend contract holds, with a maintenance check for drift. Onboarding access is arranged with you — a test environment first, then your live account.

User-consented credential access

Where you would rather we operate as a delegated client of your account, we drive the same surfaces using credentials you issue and can revoke from your dashboard. This suits a single merchant who wants pulls without standing infrastructure. Reachable: the same domains; Effort: low to moderate; Durability: tied to your credential lifecycle.

Native export as a fallback

For point-in-time needs, Paysley's reporting export covers historical transactions and invoices without any live connection. It is the least engineering and the right answer when you need a month-end file, not a feed. We script the export-and-normalize step so it is repeatable.

For an ongoing ledger or CRM sync, the first route is what we would actually build — it reads the live synced account directly and degrades gracefully to the export when you only need a snapshot. We would only lead with credential access instead if you want zero hosted components on our side.

A look at the surface

Paysley's published developer material shows HTTP Bearer authentication, with a merchant access key as the bearer value and separate test and live hosts (test keys carry a py_test_ prefix, live keys py_live_) — confirmed against the docs during scoping. The sketch below is illustrative of how a transaction pull is shaped against that surface; exact field names are pinned during the build.

# Illustrative: list captured payments for a merchant account
GET https://live.paysley.io/v1/payments?from=2026-05-01&to=2026-05-31
Authorization: Bearer py_live_***          # merchant access key, rotated by the merchant
Accept: application/json

# Expected shape (fields confirmed during the build):
{
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "pmt_...",
      "amount": 4250,                      # minor units
      "currency": "USD",
      "channel": "qr_scan_pay",            # virtual_terminal | link | qr_scan_pay | reader
      "status": "succeeded",
      "customer_ref": "cus_...",
      "captured_at": "2026-05-14T17:03:22Z"
    }
  ],
  "next_cursor": "..."
}

# Client handling we wire in:
#  - 401 -> refresh/rotate key path, never log the key
#  - 429 -> respect retry budget, back off on cursor page
#  - card PAN is never requested, stored, or written to disk
      

What lands in your repo

Tied to the surfaces above, a Paysley engagement hands over:

• An OpenAPI/Swagger specification covering the payment, invoice, customer, and inventory calls we actually use — with the channel field treated as first-class so reader and link payments stay distinguishable.
• A protocol and auth-flow report: the Bearer-key scheme, host split between test and live, pagination cursor behaviour, and the rotation/revocation path.
• Runnable source for the key endpoints in Python and Node.js — the transaction pull, invoice status sync, and customer reconcile, with the error handling shown above.
• Automated tests against the test environment, including a channel-mix assertion so a settlement total can be reconciled by capture method.
• Interface documentation plus data-retention guidance written around PCI-aware handling — what is stored, what is deliberately not.

How access is authorized, and how we hold the data

This is merchant-side data, so the dependable basis is straightforward: you authorize access to your own Paysley account, and the credentials remain yours to issue and revoke. There is no third-party consumer whose consent we mediate. We operate under NDA where you want one, log what endpoints we touch, and minimize what we retain — raw card numbers are never requested or stored, in keeping with how PCI DSS treats cardholder data for anyone in the payment path. On the forward-looking side, the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Personal Financial Data Rights rule (12 CFR Part 1033) is where consumer-permissioned data access may eventually be standardized, but it is not in force today — enforcement has been enjoined and the rule is back in agency reconsideration — so we do not build against it as settled law. Your own authorization is what the integration rides on.

Build notes specific to this account

Two things shape how we engineer a Paysley pull, and we handle both rather than hand them to you as homework.

• The capture channel is data, not a footnote. A virtual-terminal sale, a QR Scan & Pay, an emailed link, and a Bluetooth EMV tap all settle differently, so we carry the channel tag end-to-end. Without it, a reconciliation collapses four flows into one number and hides where money actually came in.
• Bidirectional sync means timing matters. Because the app auto-syncs activity to the cloud, a naive timestamp window can double-count or miss a record that synced late. We design the pull around the cursor and the synced-at boundary, and add a re-validation check in maintenance so a backend or front-end change shows up as a failing test instead of quietly dropping rows.
• Test environment first. Access is arranged with you during onboarding; the build runs against the py_test_ host before it ever touches live, so nothing learns on production traffic.

Two worked examples

1. Nightly settlement into accounting. A pull of the prior day's succeeded payments, grouped by channel, normalized to your chart of accounts and written to your ledger before open of business — with the reader fees and link payments reconciled separately.
2. Invoice status mirror in a CRM. Paysley invoices and payment requests are polled for paid/unpaid state and reminder history, and that state is mirrored onto the matching CRM record so sales sees an accurate AR position without logging into two systems.

Screens we worked from

The store screenshots below informed how the surfaces map; click to enlarge.

Neighbouring apps in the same space

If you run more than one tool, a unified integration usually has to reach several of these. Names are listed for context, not ranked.

• Square — point-of-sale and online payments with a customer directory and inventory; transaction and catalog records map closely to Paysley's.
• Stripe — payments, invoices, and subscriptions held server-side; a common reconciliation counterpart for online flows.
• PayPal Zettle — card-present and mobile payments for small merchants, with sales and product data behind an account.
• SumUp — reader-based and remote payments aimed at small business, holding transaction and payout history.
• Helcim — merchant payments and invoicing with detailed transaction and customer records.
• Clover — POS hardware and software keeping orders, inventory, and payment data per merchant location.
• FreshBooks — invoicing and AR with payment status that often needs mirroring alongside a processor.
• Wave — free invoicing and payments for solo and small businesses, holding invoice and payment records.
• Invoice Ninja — invoicing and payment tracking across many payment methods, with exportable records.

Sources and what was checked

Mapping reviewed May 2026 against Paysley's own product, support, and developer pages and the app's Play Store description, cross-checked with the PCI Security Standards Council on cardholder-data handling. Specifics — the Bearer-key auth, the test/live host split, the capture channels — come from those pages, opened during scoping.

• Paysley developer documentation
• Paysley eCommerce solutions and integrations
• Paysley support — integrations
• PCI Security Standards Council — PCI DSS

Reviewed by the OpenBanking Studio integration desk, May 2026.

Questions an integrator tends to ask

Where does a Paysley transaction record actually live — the phone or the cloud?

The cloud. The mobile app is a front end onto the same merchant account as the desktop platform; every payment, invoice, and inventory change syncs to the server. That is the surface we integrate against, so a device being offline or reset never costs you history.

Can you separate card-present reader payments from text, link, and QR-code payments?

Yes. Paysley tags the capture channel — virtual terminal, text or email link, Scan & Pay QR, or a Bluetooth EMV/swipe/tap reader. We carry that channel field through to the normalized schema so settlement and channel-mix reporting stay distinct.

How is access to my Paysley account authorized, and who holds the keys?

You authorize access to your own merchant account, and the credentials stay yours — issued, rotated, and revoked from your Paysley dashboard. We work under NDA, log what we touch, and never store raw card numbers; the build runs against your test environment first.

Does anything change if Paysley updates its app or its hosts?

It can, and we plan for it. Auth headers, host names, and field names are pinned in the spec we hand over, and maintenance includes a re-validation pass so a front-end or endpoint change surfaces as a failing check rather than silent data loss.

Working with us

You bring the app name and what you want out of its data; we arrange access with you and do the rest. Pick how you pay: a one-time source-code delivery starting at $300, where you receive the runnable client, the spec, the tests, and the docs, and pay only after delivery once you are satisfied — or our pay-per-call hosted API, where you call our endpoints and pay for the calls with no upfront fee. Either way the cycle runs one to two weeks. Tell us what you need at /contact.html and we will scope it.