Paper checks are old school.
Dwolla saves companies and their employees time and money by improving their recurring or single-entry payout process. We’ve reduced the complex nature of the ACH protocol down to several statuses for bank transfers and payouts.
Using the Automated Clearing House (ACH) enables businesses to electronically initiate a single-entry or recurring payment from or to customers. Dwolla offers a mass payment tool to alleviate the costs of outdated payout processes and allows up to 5,000 payments to be sent with one API request.
This blog will further explore both single and recurring payouts and how Dwolla’s API remains invisible while handling a variety of use cases.
Affordability
Also known as a mass payment, mass payouts offer a significant advantage over repeatedly calling the endpoint for individual transactions. A key benefit is that a bank-funded mass payout only incurs a single ACH debit from the bank account to fund the entire batch of payments.
Comparatively, the alternative approach incurs an ACH debit from the bank funding source for each individual payment.
Pricing that takes a fee or portion of every transaction can stifle profit growth.
That type of pricing model was one of the reasons Encast chose Dwolla as its payment provider. Encast is a cloud-based system to make it easier for employers to offer their employees a way to donate.
Leo Ramirez Jr, CEO and and founder of Encast, says more than $400 billion is given to nonprofit organizations each year, but $4 billion of that—or roughly 1%—never makes it to the intended organization. Instead, it goes to credit card companies, merchant services or donation platforms in the form of transaction fees.
He says he wanted to make sure Encast, was fee-free.
“I believe it’s wrong that when someone makes a donation to a nonprofit, money is taken away from the nonprofit’s pockets,” Leo says. “Luckily, Dwolla has this fee-free mechanism on the transaction side that allows us to meet our promise of never charging transaction fees to nonprofits.”
Automate manual tasks
By automating a business’s payouts process, customers can receive timely payouts while businesses reduce their costs associated with manually managing multiple payout solutions.
Dwolla’s v2 API is a RESTful API, following best practices in its design and improves on the developer experience from the legacy v1 API.
- Webhooks: Automate notifications within your application
- Metadata: Easily reference and reconcile items within a transaction, including grouping transactions
- Customization: continue your customer loyalty with a branded user interface
Dwolla’s mass payment tool is easy for customers to access and manage without any technical support. A mass payout can be sent in a few clicks. It’s as simple as uploading a CSV file with email addresses and corresponding payment amounts.
One of Dwolla’s customers—Relay Delivery—saved nearly $1,200 a month by integrating with Dwolla to modernize their payout process.
Using only one developer, this restaurant delivery platform was able to automate its customer onboarding experience and payouts flow by integrating with Dwolla…and it only took two weeks.
Previously, Relay would gather banking information through a paper signup process and manually type routing and accounting numbers into their banking interface.
“In implementing Dwolla, we’ve fully automated the signup and disbursement phases,” said Zach Ivester, Relay Delivery Integrations Architect. “We’ve freed ourselves to focus on what’s important…our business.”
Monitor transactions, find trends
Dwolla powers ACH transfers while making sure your users’ sensitive financial information never hits your servers.
While our servers prepare a mass payout, each item is processed one after the other, at a rate between 0.5 seconds and one second. We typically expect a 1,000-item mass payment to be completed in no more than 16 minutes.
And with our uptime rate above 99 percent, our servers were built to be resilient to failure and respond to errors in a way that keeps your application online and running.
After making a mass payout, Dwolla’s customers appreciate access to an intuitive dashboard.
The dashboard features an interface with three key aspects for administrators:
- Customer Management
- Transaction Monitoring
- Business trends and performance metrics
Dwolla’s simple interface allows administrators to look up and manage customer information and transactions. From editing user details to viewing transaction history, the dashboard makes it simple to support and schedule a mass payout or single-entry payout.
Dwolla’s dashboard allows administrators to easily reconcile payments and view transactions sent across the application. Administrators can monitor transaction statuses without needing to build an internal display from the ground up.
And using beautiful graphs and charts—with data populated by Dwolla’s API—provides administrators with desired insights into key business metrics and trends.
