Onboarding

Set up your account once, then create an application per website or app you want to accept payments on — each application gets its own integration key and encryption key.

1. Create your account

1. Register for a Pesepay account.

2. Check your email for your username and a system-generated password, then log in and change your password.

3. Open My Business in the left-hand menu and choose how you’re registering — Personal (individual or sole trader) or Corporate (registered company) — then click Get Started.

4. Fill in your Business Profile and click Submit. The documents are uploaded in the same form, alongside your business details, so have them ready before you start:

   Registering as	Uploads the form requires
   Personal	Identification Document (government-issued national ID or passport) and Proof of Address
   Corporate	CR14 / Deed of Trust, Certificate of Incorporation, and — for each business director — their email, phone number, full name and Proof of Identification

   Bank account proof isn’t part of this form — it’s uploaded per application when you add a payout account.

5. Sign the Merchant Agreement. Once your profile is saved, My Business shows a link to download the agreement: download it, sign it, upload it under Upload Signed Merchant Agreement Contract, and click Submit. This sends your account for review.

Note

Review is manual — the progress bar on My Business moves from Business Profile through Merchant Agreement to Account Review, and you’ll be notified by email once your account is approved. You can build and test against the sandbox while you wait.

2. Add your first application

1. In the Merchant Control Panel, open Applications in the left-hand menu.
2. Click Create and fill in the application details — this can represent a website, a mobile app, or any product surface you’re integrating.
3. If you want a custom payment page instead of the default Pesepay-hosted one, opt in and provide its URL.
4. Submit. Your application now appears in the applications list.

Find your keys

In the applications list, click View Details on the application. The Application Details tab shows both keys:

Key	Used for
Integration key	The authorization header on every API request
Encryption key	Encrypting requests and decrypting responses (Encryption Guide)

The other tabs on that page are Payout Accounts (Indirect Settlement), Payout Accounts (Direct Settlement), Transactional Fees, Invoices and Tracking Orders.

Caution

Each application’s keys belong to one environment. Sandbox keys work only against the sandbox URLs and live keys only against the production URLs — see Sandbox vs live keys for what mixing them looks like when it goes wrong.

Caution

Treat both keys like passwords. Never call the Pesepay API from client-side/browser code — see API Keys & Credentials.

3. Payout accounts

Settlement happens T+2 days from the day a customer completes a transaction, once the minimum amount defined in your Merchant Agreement is reached. Payout accounts are configured per application, and any change (adding or editing an account) requires Pesepay approval — while a request is pending, new sales continue to process but settlement to that account is on hold.

To add one: Applications → View Details → Payout Accounts (Indirect Settlement) → Create, then provide the account name, account number, settlement notification email address, currency, bank, and an uploaded bank statement.

Note

Payout accounts are per currency. An account approved for USD does not cover payments you take in Zimbabwe dollars — add one account per currency you charge in, or you’ll accumulate a balance you can’t withdraw. This also matters for anyone receiving a share of your payments through split payments.

4. Give your team access

Other people in your organisation get into the Merchant Control Panel through groups. A group is a set of users with the same role — Accounts Clerks, Supervisors, Managers — and permissions are granted to the group, not to individuals. A user takes on their group’s permissions the moment they’re added to it.

1. Create the groups. User Manager → Groups → Create Group, give it a name and description, and submit.

2. Assign permissions. On the group’s ⋮ menu choose View Group Permissions. The screen has two lists — Unassigned Permissions on the left, Permissions to Assign on the right. Select the permissions the role needs and use Assign Selected (or Assign All) to move them across; Remove Selected / Remove All takes them back. You can come back and change this at any time.

3. Create the users. User Manager → Users, then add each person — initials, first and last name, username, phone number and email — and put them in a group. They receive login credentials by email and inherit that group’s permissions automatically.

The users list shows each person’s username, email, group and status (Active, Inactive or Account Locked), and a user can be moved to a different group later — their permissions change with them, immediately.

Group the permissions by what the role actually does. A common starting set is one group per function — administration, development, finance, support — so that, for example, a developer can read transactions and manage applications without being able to change payout accounts.

Tip

Keep integration keys out of this: the API doesn’t use dashboard user accounts. Groups control who can see transactions, move settlement details, or issue refunds in the panel — not who can call the API.

5. Working in the dashboard

Once you’re live, day-to-day operations live under Payments in the left-hand menu, per application (use the application dropdown to switch):

• Payments → Transactions — every payment for the selected application, with its status, reference number, amount and date. This is where you reconcile against your own records — see Checking payment status for doing the same thing programmatically.
• Payments → Invoices — generate an invoice for an application and email it to a customer; they pay it through the same Pesepay flow.
• Payments → Payouts — track settlements and their status against each payout account (see section 3).

Sandbox → Payments / Transactions is the same pair of screens against the sandbox environment.

Note

The full walkthrough with screenshots is in the Pesepay User Manual.

Next step

You have your keys — send your first sandbox payment.