Dwolla ACH Payments Integration for Payroll Company

About Poppins Payroll

Poppins Payroll is a tech company out of Boulder, CO that provides a platform for automating and simplifying payroll and tax processing for household employees (think nannies and child care, senior care, house cleaners, in-home teachers). Their platform is designed to comply with state and federal tax laws around how these professionals are paid and how taxes are collected and paid by both employers and employees.

Switching to the Dwolla Platform

Poppins Payroll’s existing direct deposit solution posed two main issues:

1. It involved two different platforms: one platform to collect money, and one platform to distribute money. This approach was neither cost-effective nor sustainable from a maintenance perspective.
2. Using two platforms increased Poppins’s financial liability, requiring Poppins to act as a holding account of funds and store account information of employers and employees.

Switching their payment processing software to the Dwolla platform solves both issues, combining integrations into a single platform to drive efficiency, and removing Poppins as an intermediary between parties where funds are flowing as a more cost-effective measure for their process.

Custom Integration Partners

Experienced engineers know that even in 2021, incorporating new software into your existing ecosystem is rarely as easy as “plug-and-play.” One way or another, existing data and processes must be accessed or even migrated from often-legacy systems and databases, and this can lead to additional challenges, bottlenecks, and blockers along the way:

Build New, Maintain Existing

Poppins needed to maintain their existing platform’s data and functionality while integrating Dwolla’s platform features and migrating users. In order to safely build and test these new features and connections, we set up feature toggles to only impact a specific subset of users, while supporting both workflows simultaneously.

More Than Migrations

Where possible, we migrated existing users over to the new system, but Poppins also needed a way to onboard new users and verify user accounts in Dwolla. To accomplish this, we built custom interfaces over the Dwolla’s white-label API, which enables identity verification, bank account verification, an employer-to-employee invitation system, and includes a knowledge-based-authentication process and a document upload ID verification process.

Next Step Notifications

Poppins’ existing ACH processes were manual and did not provide timely feedback or easy error resolution, which increased the risk of failed transactions. To address this concern, we built out a notification system using webhooks and custom endpoints. This system lets end users know when money is leaving or entering their accounts, and lets Poppins know if there are any problems with a transaction.