Settings & fees

Everything below lives in your dashboard under Settings. Defaults are sensible — most merchants only ever touch the fee pass-on toggle.

Fees — and who pays them

The FlexiLay fee is a percentage of the full plan total (default 5%), collected once, with the deposit — instalments after that carry no fee. You choose who wears it:

You absorb it (default) — the customer pays exactly the plan total; the fee comes out of the deposit payout.
Pass it to the customer — the fee is added on top of their deposit, shown clearly as part of the “pay today” figure before they commit. It appears as one line — “LayBy service fee”, “Lay-A-Way service fee” or “Payment plan service fee”, matching your branding mode — covering the FlexiLay fee and card processing together. It is never itemised as a separate FlexiLay fee or card surcharge, and the checkout and customer terms carry this disclosure beside it: “This fee is charged for establishing and administering your FlexiLay payment plan. It is not a card payment surcharge and does not vary based on the card used to make your payments.”

Plan rules

These shape what the customer can choose on the setup page:

Rule	Default	Notes
Deposit range	10–50% of the total	Optionally restrict to your own min/max
Number of instalments	2–12	Optionally restrict to your own min/max
Payment frequency	Weekly, fortnightly, monthly	Turn off any you don't want to offer

Within your rules, the customer picks whatever suits them — that flexibility is a big part of why plans complete.

Branding wording

Customer-facing pages can present FlexiLay in lay-by wording (retail stores) or payments wording (invoice businesses). Pick whichever matches how you sell — it changes the language on the setup page, portal and emails, not how plans work.

Test mode

Test Mode lets you (or a customer you're demoing to) run the entire flow — checkout, setup page, deposit, portal — without any real charge. It switches itself off automatically after the duration you pick, so it can't be left on by accident. While it's on, plans created are clearly simulated.

For developers: API key, status webhook & checkout return

API Key — authenticates your site or plugin to the FlexiLay API. Treat it like a password; it's shown under Settings → API Key.
Status Webhook — give us an https URL and FlexiLay POSTs a signed notification on every plan status change. The signing secret appears when you save the URL.
Checkout Return URL — where the payment page's "Cancel & Return to store" link sends a customer when their plan doesn't carry its own checkout link. Clicking it cancels the unfunded plan and returns them to your site — so someone who picked the wrong payment option is never stranded. A checkoutUrl sent per order via the API always takes precedence; leave the setting blank and API-created plans without one show no return link.

Both are covered end-to-end in the custom site guide.

Accounting accounts: two more settings live here — “Write the plan link onto the invoice” (auto-adds a payment-plan link to every new unpaid invoice) and “Record each successful payment against the invoice” (books instalments as ledger Payments so the invoice balance falls in step). Connection itself is managed on the dashboard's Accounting page. Both are covered in the Xero and QuickBooks guides.