Merchant onboarding
Status: Proposed product workflow, subject to regulated partner KYB, underwriting and account requirements.
Onboarding stages
| Stage | Merchant action | Sparelane action | Exit criteria |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interest | Request access or accept invitation | Create prospect and owner | Contact verified |
| Organisation | Enter legal/trading name, ABN/ACN, address and industry | Validate format and deduplicate | Legal entity identified |
| Representatives | Identify authorised officers, billing, technical and finance contacts | Apply access roles and identity verification requirements | Authorised administrator verified |
| Risk/KYB | Provide requested documents and business activity | Send to partner/underwriting, track review | Approved, declined or more info |
| Payout | Nominate settlement destination | Verify ownership and require approval for changes | Destination approved |
| Commercial | Review pricing and contractual terms | Record signed version and effective dates | Agreement active |
| Integration | Create sandbox credentials, test webhooks and bills | Run integration checklist | Certification passed |
| Go-live | Confirm notifications, consent flow and support contacts | Enable production under controlled rollout | Merchant ACTIVE |
Do not activate payment processing simply because an ABN or email is valid. Partner approval, applicable legal arrangements and operational readiness are separate gates.
Merchant status model
PROSPECT → INVITED → APPLICATION_IN_PROGRESS → UNDER_REVIEW → APPROVED → INTEGRATION → READY → ACTIVE. Alternative states: MORE_INFORMATION_REQUIRED, REJECTED, SUSPENDED, CLOSED. Store status reason, actor, evidence and timestamps.
Merchant console
- Overview: collection health, upcoming bills, failures, pending settlement, payouts and exceptions.
- Customers: merchant-specific references, Sparelane link status, mandate status; do not expose full payment details.
- Bills: create/import, view status and version history, cancel where permitted, export.
- Collections: attempt timeline, failure categories, recovery status and exception handling.
- Payouts: batch totals, bank destination masked details, allocations, statement downloads.
- Billing: Sparelane subscription, success fees, invoices and payment status.
- Integrations: sandbox/production keys, webhook endpoints, delivery logs and replay.
- Team: invitations, roles, MFA and audit history.
- Settings: merchant profile, approved payout destinations, notifications and support contacts.
Roles and separation of duties
Merchant Owner/Admin manages organisation and team. Finance can view payouts and invoices; Operations manages bills and exceptions; Developer manages integration credentials. High-risk changes (especially payout destination and production API credentials) require step-up authentication, independent verification and, where justified, two-person approval. Define precise permissions in an RBAC matrix before implementation.
Acceptance criteria
No production bill can be collected for a merchant lacking active status, valid contract, approved payout arrangement and required partner checks. Every status change and payout destination update is audited.