Payments: Your Own Razorpay and Stripe Keys, Money Straight to You

Why getting paid takes longer than it should

Most late payments are not disputes. They are friction. The invoice was a PDF attachment, so paying it meant opening a banking app and typing account numbers. Or the payment link went to a different address than the invoice. Or the client paid and nobody noticed for a week, so a reminder went out anyway and the relationship took a small, unnecessary hit.

Behind that sits a reconciliation problem. The gateway dashboard knows a payment arrived. The invoice, in a different system, does not. Someone has to connect the two by hand, and until they do, every question about whether a client is up to date has an unreliable answer. We covered the tracking side in how to track client payments.

And then there is the platform-fee problem. A lot of all-in-one tools route your client's money through their own merchant account and keep a percentage. On agency invoice sizes, that adds up to a meaningful number for something that is really just a database write.

What Arpixa Payments is

Arpixa Payments is a bring-your-own-gateway payment layer. You connect your own accounts, and Arpixa acts as the thing that ties the checkout to the right invoice and keeps the record straight.

Connecting Razorpay means pasting your key id and key secret. Connecting Stripe means pasting your secret key, and optionally your publishable key. In both cases Arpixa verifies the credentials against the gateway before saving them, so a typo fails at setup rather than at the moment a client tries to pay. Verified keys are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM and held in a private area of the workspace that the browser app cannot read. Either gateway can be disconnected later.

Bank transfer is also supported for agencies that need it: bank name, account holder, account number with confirmation, IFSC code, and branch, encrypted the same way, and shown on public invoices masked to the last four digits.

The positioning follows from the architecture. Because the checkout is created on your gateway account, funds never pass through Arpixa, so there is nothing for Arpixa to take a percentage of.

What you can do with payments

How a payment actually completes

The client opens the invoice, either on the public pay page — no login, nothing to sign up for — or in their portal, where a Pay Now action appears only if there is a balance outstanding.

Arpixa checks the invoice is not already paid, computes what is outstanding by subtracting any advance and anything already collected from the total, and refuses to open a checkout if that comes to zero. Then, depending on the gateway:

• Razorpay — an order is created on your account and the Razorpay checkout opens inline on the page, with the client's name and email prefilled, covering UPI, cards, net banking, and wallets.
• Stripe — a hosted Checkout session is created and the client is redirected, returning to the pay page afterwards.

Confirmation is verified server-side rather than trusted from the browser. For Stripe, Arpixa retrieves the Checkout session and confirms its payment status. For Razorpay, it verifies an HMAC signature over the order and payment identifiers. On success the invoice is marked Paid with the time, the gateway, and the payment id, and confirmation emails go to the client and to you.

Webhooks are the belt to that braces. Gateway webhooks are verified against your webhook secret — Stripe's signature check, or an HMAC over the raw body for Razorpay — before anything is written, and Arpixa compares the incoming payment id against the last one it recorded, so a retried or replayed webhook cannot double-record a payment. The client sees a plain confirmation that the invoice is now paid.

Saved methods, partial payments, and refunds

For clients who pay you repeatedly, a signed-in client can save a payment method against your agency: a card with its brand, last four digits, and expiry, or a UPI handle, bank, or wallet. They can set a default and remove one later. With a saved Stripe card you can charge off-session, which is the difference between a retainer that renews and a retainer you chase.

Partial payments are supported on the record-keeping side. Recording a payment below the total accumulates the amount paid, appends an entry to the invoice's payment history with the amount, method, provider, transaction reference, and date, and sets the invoice to Partially Paid. This is also how you log a payment that happened off-platform — a bank transfer, a cheque — from the client's Payments tab. Worth being precise about one thing: gateway checkout always charges the full remaining balance, so a client cannot decide at the checkout screen to pay half.

Refunds go back through whichever gateway took the payment, either in full or for a specific amount you enter in the invoice currency. Each request carries an idempotency key, so a double-click cannot produce two refunds. Only the workspace owner can issue one, deliberately — it is not delegated to team roles. Both your agency and the client get an email, and the gateway's own refund state, whether pending, processed, succeeded, or failed, is passed through as-is rather than assumed.

How it connects to the rest of Arpixa

• Every payment is against an invoice, and updates its status, amount paid, and payment history.
• Payment history appears on the client record in your CRM, with a total collected figure and a Record Payment action for off-platform payments.
• Clients pay from the branded client portal or a public pay page, and see a My Payments section.
• Analytics reports collected revenue, outstanding balance, and invoice aging.
• Automations can react to an invoice being paid, for example with a thank-you message or a follow-up task.

Arpixa has a real Free plan (not a trial), with Starter at $12/month, Pro at $29/month, and Advanced at $89/month. Arpixa charges no transaction fee on client payments, because they run on your own gateway account; gateway fees are set by Razorpay or Stripe. Emailing invoices to clients requires Starter or above. Annual billing lowers the effective monthly cost, and the pricing page is the source of truth for current plan limits.

How to set up payments

1. Open payment settings and paste your Razorpay key pair, your Stripe secret key, or both.
2. Let Arpixa verify each set of keys against the gateway before saving them encrypted.
3. Add your bank details if you also want to offer manual transfer, shown to clients masked to the last four digits.
4. Pick a default payment method for new invoices.
5. Send an invoice, and the client pays from the public pay page or their portal.
6. The webhook marks the invoice paid, confirmation emails go out, and payment history is recorded.

Related reading: payment links for agencies, invoicing clients with Stripe, and Razorpay invoicing for agencies.

Frequently asked questions