Finocket already lets your customer pay an invoice — every open invoice on the client portal and the invoice PDF carries a UPI intent link and QR for the exact outstanding, so they scan or tap and pay in their own UPI app. A hosted gateway checkout (a pay page the gateway hosts) and auto-charge mandates (recurring authorisations) need a payment gateway wired in the middle.
What is live today
The plumbing for a gateway is built and secure — but no gateway is wired in yet, so nothing charges on its own. Concretely:
- Built: the gateway interface (verify credentials, create a hosted checkout link, create/cancel a mandate, charge an active mandate, verify a webhook) and an encrypted credential vault (AES-256-GCM) to hold a gateway account's secrets safely.
- Designed, not migrated: the mandate record shape (which client, which gateway, the per-charge ceiling, the cadence, the expiry) is designed, but its database table is deliberately not created until a gateway is chosen — so there is no unused table sitting in production.
- Not live: hosted checkout links and auto-charge. No gateway is available to select yet, so the connect form on Settings → Payment gateway shows the honest “no payment gateway connected” state. Auto-charge switches on only once a gateway is chosen and its credentials are connected.
The same keys now collect for your online shop
The account you connect here is no longer only about invoices. If you sell through your Finocket shop, this is the account that shop collects into — your customer pays your payment provider, and the money lands in your own account. Finocket is not in the middle of it at any point.
- Live keys only. A shop checkout will never use your Test connection. A test payment confirms an order that nobody has actually paid for, and an order that says paid when no money moved is the one mistake a checkout must not make. Connect Live before you expect a shop order to go through.
- Your shopper can pay by UPI, card or netbanking on your provider's own payment page, and the order is confirmed the moment your provider tells us the payment went through.
Why a plain UPI QR is not offered for shop orders
You can put a UPI ID or a printed QR in front of a customer today, and for an invoice that works perfectly well — you see the money arrive in your bank and you record the payment. A shop order is different, because something has to decide whether to release the goods.
Money sent to a plain UPI ID goes straight from your shopper's phone to your bank. Nothing tells Finocket it arrived. So the order would sit unconfirmed however promptly your shopper paid, and you would be the one reconciling bank alerts against orders by hand. UPI through your own payment provider does report back, which is why that is the one on offer. The two are deliberately not both called simply “UPI”: they differ in the only thing your shopper cares about — whether their order is confirmed.
If we cannot read your keys, you are told that
There is a difference between you have not connected an account and we are holding your keys and cannot read them, and they used to look identical on screen. They are different problems with different fixes, and the second one is not yours to fix: your keys are intact, and re-entering them would overwrite the ones we already hold. The screen now says which of the two it is, and tells you not to reconnect when reconnecting would destroy something.
A shop checkout now draws the same distinction, in four answers rather than two, because each one is a different person's job:
- You have not connected a provider. Yours to fix, and it takes about two minutes on this screen.
- What is saved is incomplete — one of the two keys is missing. Also yours, and reconnecting is the right move here.
- We cannot decrypt what you saved. Ours. Your keys are fine; the key that protects them needs restoring on our side. Do not re-enter yours — that would overwrite keys that were never wrong.
- We could not read them at all. Ours too, and usually temporary. Nothing about your account is wrong.
In every one of the four, your shopper is told that nothing has been charged — and only the last one suggests trying again, because only the last one can clear on its own.
What the status beside each provider means
Each provider on Settings → Collect payments carries a status, and there are five of them — because “we cannot use your keys” and “you have not given us any” are different problems for different people, and only two of the five are yours to fix.
- Connected — your keys are saved and we can read them. Your invoices can carry a payment link, and if this is your Live connection your shop checkout collects into this account.
- Off — you have not connected this provider. The form below is how you do it.
- Incomplete — something was saved and one of the two values is missing, so a payment would be refused. Enter both again.
- Needs us — we are holding your keys and cannot open them. Do not re-enter them. They are not wrong, and connecting again would overwrite them and destroy what we need to put it right. There is no form on this state for exactly that reason. Tell support and payments resume without you changing anything.
- Unknown — we could not check this connection just now. That is on our side; your stored keys are untouched and nothing you type would change it.
If the whole list fails to load you are told that too, rather than being shown an empty screen — an empty list and a list we could not read look identical otherwise, and only one of them means you have connected nothing.
What your shop offers, and what it can charge
These are now the same question. Your shop checkout offers card and UPI payment when your provider account is connected and we can read it — not when some setting of ours happens to be present. Before this they were decided separately, so a shop with nothing connected could show a card option and fail at the last step, and a shop on perfectly good keys of its own could be offered nothing at all.
Providers we do not offer, and why
Any provider we cannot offer is listed on the screen with its reason, rather than simply being absent — a missing name reads as an oversight, and these are decisions.
PayU is the one people ask for. Its payment system requires your shopper's name, email address and phone number to be sent to PayU with every order — they are built into the signature it checks, so there is no version of it that leaves them out. Finocket does not hand a shopper's personal details to a payment company, so PayU is not offered. That is a decision rather than a feature waiting to be built, and your provider's own payment page offers the same UPI, cards and netbanking without it.
PhonePe is listed for a different reason: the work to talk to it is genuinely unfinished on our side, and there is no merchant agreement behind it. PhonePe also issues four values rather than two, which this screen does not yet collect — so connecting it today would save something incomplete by design. It is named with that reason rather than left off the list, because a provider you use and cannot find reads as an oversight.
Finocket never moves money itself
This is a hard rule. Finocket does not hold funds, does not take card details, and does not run charges. When a gateway is wired, the gateway hosts the payment page and executes every charge; Finocket only creates the link, records the outcome and reconciles it. A mandate can be charged only when the customer has approved it and only up to the ceiling they authorised — never more.
Why a gateway is required
Executing a card or account charge is a regulated activity that flows through a licensed payment gateway. Choosing one is a commercial decision (pricing, settlement, mandate support), so Finocket ships the vendor-neutral interface and vault now and lets you connect the gateway you pick, without a product update.
What you can do in the meantime
- Share the invoice — the client portal and the PDF already carry a UPI intent link and QR for the exact balance, so your customer pays in their own UPI app.
- Record the payment on Add → Payment when it lands, and it flows into your books and receivables as usual.
Claims discipline: the payment-gateway interface and the credential vault are built; the mandate schema is designed but its migration is deferred; no gateway is connected yet, so Finocket does not create hosted checkout links or auto-charge today, and never moves money itself. UPI pay-now does the collection job in the customer's own app. We will say so plainly until a gateway is live.