Paypal adaptive payments - audit trail

Question

We're planning a web app that allows users to pay our clients directly through Paypal so there will be many different users and each will be paying a specific client through the website and there will be multiple clients.

These payments may be one-off payments but a few may be recurring.

We won't be charging a transaction fee for this so we basically want the whole payment amount to be deposited in the client's Paypal account (so they pay their own Paypal fees). I've looked at chained payments to be able to take a payment for a client but I'm just wondering what the actual flow of money is in a chained payment.

When a chained payment is made does Paypal deposit the payment go into our Paypal account first and then be paid into the client's account or does the client portion (in this case 100%) go directly into the client's account?

I'm asking as we're not sure how it would affect us in terms of accounting in our business if all the payment money was actually passing through our Paypal account (even if only briefly).

Or is a chained payment not the ideal solution for this?

Thanks,

Steve

Answer 1

If you are not taking a cut of the money, then I believe either Simple or Parallel payments would be a better solution. If you are going to be processing payments for a single buyer to a single merchant, then you can just use Simple Payments. If you are going to be processing payments for a single buyer to multiple merchants then you'd want to use Parallel Payments. More information on each of those APIs can be found here.