A General Overview of the DNA Payments’ Dashboard

DNA Payments is one of our partner payment sites, on which you can accept and manage your customers’ payments.  It’s easy enough to use: there’s a main page, and a left-hand sidebar, which we’ll take you through right now. Easy-peasy.

Once you log in, you’ll be directed to your Merchant Portal. This is where you can monitor, track and manage your transactions, refunds and settlements. 

Here’s what you’ll see along the sidebar: 

A brief audit of all your payment workflows. Here, you can see the balance of successful and declined payments. You can also see a bar chart, or line chart, summarising and comparing your transactions across different time periods. You can view this in terms of the amount you’ve earned, or the total number of transactions you’ve completed. You can toggle between POS payments and online payments, and filter different time periods, using the ‘last 90 days’ drop-down at the top. 

Predictably, here, you can access real-time updates on payments made via American Express. It’ll show as a statement, much like a bank statement, with headings such as the transaction amount, its status, the card used, and the type of transaction. 

These two sections are where you can monitor each payment you process.  You can use quick links to monitor the payments’ main status. For online payments, you can view all payments, pending payments, and charged payments.  For POS payments, you can view: all, successful, and declined.  Again, you can drill down into these transactions by changing the time period you view. Then there are other filters available, including: 

• Shop name 

• Order number

• Post link

• Customer ID or Retrieval Number

• Email

• Refund date 

• Currency

From there, you can filter payments based on whether they’ve been:  

1. Authorised (where the issuer bank accepts the payment)

2. Charged (payment has been completed and processed to the merchant)

3. Cancelled (if you, the merchant, cancelled the payment)

4. Refunded (if you’ve had to refund the money to the customer) 

5. Declined (if the payment got declined by the issuer bank or acquirer)

A payment link lets you accept payments online, via DNA Payments specifically.  You can request it from customer service. This feature will then be automatically available via your DNA portal. 

Once that’s done, you can use this section of the sidebar to create payment links, (click ‘+ New Payment Link’) to send to your customers. You can even send them via the built-in emailing and SMS functionality on the portal.  Of course, you can also manage your existing links, filtering them to show ‘all, ‘active’, ‘paid’, and ‘attempted’ links.  If customers pay via a payment link, you can also accept them and refund them via the portal. 

This is where you can accept payments over the phone, or via email. You activate the terminal by requesting it, and then it’s all about logging in, and viewing it through the sidebar.  It’ll show you a statement of all payments, including the customer, payment method, date, and action. From there, you can accept payments, and specify the transaction type and sale amounts.  

Although chargebacks can be a stressful situation, you can monitor them easily via the portal. Like all the other sidebars, it will show you a statement of relevant transactions, including the amount, the chargeback date, the transaction date, and the status of the chargeback, as well as the reason. This helps you to be proactive with any chargebacks you receive, and to stand your ground, where necessary.

This is basically your bank statement of completed transactions. It works just like online banking: you are given a statement, with all the relevant transactional information (who paid, the amount, etc).  

You can filter these statements by date, and toggle your experience to show ‘per transactions’ (to break down exactly what the transactions are) and ‘per day’ (to break down the transactions that took place on a particular day). You can generate PDFs of your reports by clicking on the PDF button in the middle right of the screen. Alternatively, you can export the reports (we’re poets and we didn’t know it!) by clicking ‘export’ on the sidebar.

This helps you keep a steady record of your transactions.  This is also where you can specify a currency and a time zone by which to monitor your transactions. This should correspond with the system of payment you use (Mastercard, etc.).

Basically, they should be in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Be aware that settlement periods—i.e the time it takes to settle the transaction—can vary. It will depend on what you agreed upon in your contract with DNA. The options are:

• T+1 (you’ll receive funds in your bank the next UK working day)

• T+2 (you’ll receive them the SECOND working day) 

• T+3 (and, you’ll receive them on the third working days)

7. Billing It’s not all about the money that comes in: it’s also about the fees that are going out. The ‘Billing’ section of the dashboard is where you can download invoices (by selecting ‘invoices’ on the menu bar, and selecting the relevant file to download as a PDF).  You can also set parameters, such as the right time period, for your reports. Simply click the top search tool bar on the ‘Billing’ page. 

For more info about DNA Payments and how they work with Zap, check out ‘What is DNA Payments’. And for more info about how you can get those payments rolling in, check out Team Zap’s wonderful bunch of competitions experts.