Payouts Best Practices

API Guidelines

Guidelines to follow while making API calls:

• All the API calls have to be server-to-server calls. API calls made from an Android application or website frontend will fail.
• Ensure all the calls are made within a range of 5-10 transactions per sec (TPS).
• Pass your RazorpayX bank account number against the account_number parameter in the Payout API/Composite Payout API.
  • DO NOT pass your beneficiary account number here. The payout will fail.
  • Use your customer identifier to make payouts from RazorpayX Lite.
  • Use your current account number to make payouts from your RazorpayX Current Account.
  • Navigate to My Account and Settings → Banking to get your RazorpayX bank account number.
• We recommend using your internal transaction_id as the reference_id value in a Payout API request.
• In some cases, a webhook can be triggered more than once. We recommend you to apply deduplication while consuming webhooks based on the Payout ID and the payout status.

API Key Guidelines

• Ensure that your API key, that is the <KEY_ID> and <KEY_SECRET>, is not publicly available. Limited people should have access to this. We recommend you store them as environment variables.
• Ensure you download and save your API key when you generate them. We do not store these at our end. If you lose them, you will have to regenerate your API key.
• The API keys are the same for Payment Gateway and RazorpayX. Regenerating the keys will affect both PG and Payout APIs.

Types of Payout APIs

There are two types of APIs to create payouts.

• Normal Payout API
• Composite Payout API

Normal Payout API

You can use Normal Payout API to:

1. Create a

   Contact

   . You receive a Contact id in the response.
2. Create a Fund account using the Contact id. The Fund account can be a

   bank account

   or

   VPA

   .
3. Create a Payout to

   bank account

   or

   VPA

   using the Fund account id.

Composite Payout API

You can use the Composite Payout API to create a Contact, Fund account and payout in a single API call.

Payout States

• After a payout is created, a payout can remain in the processing state for T+3 working days, where T is the transaction time. From the processing state, a payout can move to the processed or reversed state.
• It is possible for a payout in the processed state to move to the reversed state. This can happen in a maximum time of T+3 working days. This happens in very rare occasions.

Know more about

Payout Status Details

Check Payout Status

• API calls are asynchronous. We DO NOT recommend using the Fetch Payout API to check the status of the payouts.
• We recommend subscribing to our

  webhooks

  to get instant notifications. Webhooks are triggered whenever there is a change in the status of the payout. You can update your database using the webhook payload.

Others Guidelines

Fund Account Validation

Always validate your customer's Fund account to ensure it is the account number where your user wants to receive the amount. Know more about

Workflows

We recommend that you enable workflows on your account. This allows you to set up a maker-checker process. You can have 1 person create a payout and save it as a draft. Next, you can have someone from the financial team check the payouts before they are processed. Know more about

Intelligent Payouts

Intelligent Payouts automatically detects the degradation of beneficiary bank or NPCI and queues the payout in the system for a pre-defined SLA, thereby reducing the chances of payouts being

This feature is enabled by default. You just have to consume the payout.failed event to utilise this feature. Know more about

Low Balance Alerts

We recommend that you set low balance alerts on your RazorpayX account. Once set, we will notify you when your RazorpayX account balance drops below the set threshold. Know more about

Queued Payouts

If your RazorpayX account does not have sufficient funds to process a payout, the payout fails.

To avoid such scenarios, we recommend passing queue_if_low_balance: true in the Payout API request. When you pass the parameter, if you do not have sufficient balance to process the payout, the payout is queued instead of failing. The queued payouts are automatically processed when you add funds to your RazorpayX account. Know more about

Handling 5XX Errors and Idempotency

We recommend you ensure your payout API requests are idempotent. Idempotency allows you to safely retry or send the same request multiple times without fear of performing the same action more than once. Know more about

Example

You made a request, but were unable to read/save the response sent by Razorpay. In such cases, you make another payout request. Assuming the first request was successful, your account will be debited twice. Making your payout requests idempotent helps you avoid such scenarios.

To make a request idempotent:

1. Add the header X-Payout-Idempotency to the request and pass an idempotency key against it. When a payout request is idempotent, you can make the same call multiple times, but the amount will be deducted only once.
2. If a duplicate request is found with the same idempotency key, we return the payout's latest state.

Know more about

IP Allowlisting

It is mandatory to

Related Information

• About Payouts

• Payout Life Cycle and States

• Payout Status Details