What is the idea of the Pinch Me! hackathon?

Pinch is an Australian payment solutions provider. Apart from handling the usual credit card transactions, Pinch also supports the Australian BECS Direct Debit system which allows pre-approved "direct debit" from a customer's bank account, which gives the payer the ability to set limits to the billed amount.

To promote wider use of their services, Pinch announced a "hackathon" inviting existing users and startups to develop solutions using the Pinch payments API.

Why did SyneMind participate in the Pinch Me! hackathon?

This was an opportunity to work on a feature which had long been part of the SyneMind roadmap anyway.

The idea of SyneMind is to help people organise their life around a central "life dashboard". This applies to a person and to a family, but also to a business - running or participating in the running of a company is part of many people's lives.

As such, SyneMind tries to centralise a person's "context" in one place - personal information, family information, business data... SyneMind provides the tools to take notes, manage tasks, save documents and order all of these into topics, then share a "topic" to a group - family finances in a "family" group, team data into a business team group.

But, how do you set this up? The tools are there, but - starting from zero - what do I need to have if I am just starting, for example, a new business?

Here is what SyneMind's submission to the hackathon is: a "template" for helping users tackle the "cold start" problem. Starting a business? Great! Click this button and we'll tell you what you need to figure out and how to organise it. Yes, this includes taking payments from your customers (hello, Pinch!).

What was added to SyneMind?

A new section was included called Business. This now allows SyneMind users to keep track of things related to their small business: keep notes, track tasks, contact details of people, upload documents to a collection etc. All of this shareable - i.e. for a family business, you can share it with the family members that help you run the business.

What about the "cold start" then? Well, this is where the innovation of the feature is. The way it works:

• the Business dashboard is empty when you first open it, but with a link to a "wizard" which helps you set up a business
• you select country and payment processor you want to use (currently, for this "proof of concept", this is only Australia and only Pinch)
• the wizard then creates placeholder records for you: a group for the business, a document collection where you can upload documents, a main "note" in which you can describe it and keep track of things (think of this as a "stub" wiki page which you will keep expanding in future), and reminders of the tasks that you need to complete (ASIC registration, find an accountant, get a website and professional email etc)
• if you have no actual company yet, the next step waits until you get one and can enter an Australian Business Number (ABN) in the company details
• in terms of payments, the page will give you a link to Pinch where you can register as a "merchant" - this is where you need the ABN, because Pinch only services registered companies
• when you get approved by Pinch, you can enter you API credentials in the form and voilà - you can now add your customers as Pinch "payers" and generate payment requests that you can email them, and then look up whether they paid or not

What does it look like?

Here is a "walk-through" in screenshots showing how it works from the end-user's point of view (open the images in new tab for full size).

1. User's main dashboard. There is a (newly added) Business section in the left-hand navigation.

2. When opened for the first time, there is only a button invoking the set-up wizard.

3. User selects country and preferred payment processor.

4. User is then asked to enter business details.

Note that this doesn't need to happen all at once. If the user has no ABN yet, they can return to the set up wizard whenever they get one - the site remembers what stage they are at and continues from there.

5. With the next step, the wizard pre-populates their dashboard with useful records and a to-do list.

6. With an ABN, this is now ready to connect to Pinch (which requires it).

Again, the user may return here later - after Pinch has verified them. The wizard will resume from there.

7. When the user enters their credentials, the app will authenticate for them with Pinch - no middlemen.

8. The merchant is now all set up to receive payments.

9. With Pinch configured, the user can now start adding payers.

10. "Sync from API" buttons refresh data from the API (no webhooks yet at this stage).

11. Viewing a payer - there is now the option to generate a payment link.

12. Click the button, enter amount and description, done...

13. Payment link can be sent to the payer.

SyneMind does not send these emails on behalf of the user yet, which is due to a contractual restriction with the email gateway provider.