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.

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!).

Motivation for this particular feature

There is a huge gap between a properly set up, large (or largish) and well established company, and a person who is just starting out and has absolutely no "tools" to run a business. Many start a business to "buy themselves a job" - to work what they want, without a boss. Many start a side hustle. Many run a proper business but only have a few customers and process a dozen invoices a year.

SyneMind targets these people - the under-served, those who need to manage their "digital lives" and their small business in one place but neither need, or want, or can afford (let alone know what to do with) a full-blown IT backend with a proper CRM, ERP, and accounting package.

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 sub-notes for various aspects of it, 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?

Following is an example with the proverbial users Alice, Bob etc. If you have been in software development, you would recognise their names as the main characters in "user stories". Their children are Charlie and Diana, they have a friend named Erika and so on, alphabetically.

1. Bob's dashboard

We see here Bob's SyneMind dashboard where he has a 360-degree view of all his "stuff" - family, work, investments, contacts, to-do lists...

2. Bob's notes

These are "notes with the lot" - personal wiki articles where Bob writes down things he wants to remember, uploads documents to them, and keeps them up to date as things change.

3. Document collections

Documents and media are uploaded to "collections" - virtual folders and sub-folders that can be arranged at will, and shared within groups. Bob is a coin collector but has not shared that folder with his wife, as he does not wish to explain some of the auction invoices there. However, their investments are shared so the Investment Records belong to their family group on SyneMind.

4. User groups

Bob has shared family content with Alice and the children, investment records with Alice only, and is "viewer" only for her side-hustle where she makes some jewellery as a hobby. He also maintains some data for the company that he works for, and is member of some teams from work.

5. Bob decides to start a small business too...

Now, Bob decides to start a bit of a side-hassle too. His coin collection is too large, and he has also acquired heaps of things that, on reflection, he would rather sell as "antiques". So, what next?

Well, this is the new addition to SyneMind which added during the hackathon - there is now a veritable "business setup wizard".

6. Starting is easy

Bob just need to select a name for his business and which country he lives in - which will influence what the business will need to do next, and also optionally decide whether the business will be processing payments online.

7. Things take a serious turn then

The business needs to be registered, which is a prerequisite for issuing payment requests to customers. At this point, Bob has no registration for his antiques shop yet. He can safely exit the setup wizard, and go and have his paperwork sorted elsewhere.

8. The wizard patiently waits

The new business is marked as "starting" - in other words, not ready yet. Bob can safely leave it alone for a while. Next time he returns, the wizard will continue from the point they had reached earlier.

Not that there is no content related to the business yet.

9. Things get serious

Finally, Bob has registered a company and is the proud owner of an ABN yet - his company is no longer just "starting", it is the real thing now.

10. Bob has a plan now

The wizard moves the business to the next stage... And gives it a plan, in the form of a lot of "to do" things that will be needed - a website, company email, bank account. Obviously, some of these things are optional and Bob can just delete the "tasklets" ("to do" items). Or he can follow the wizard's advice and do them...

11. And, there is structure

The wizard has also created placeholders for all the data that Bob will need - notes that act as "stub" wiki articles where Bob will add all the information he will need, and update it as the business develops.

12. Let's get ready for payments!

In the plan above, a "small" details if that there are three stages to setting up payments - just as with the ABN, this process is "asynchronous" too. In plain language - it needs some back-and-forth and cannot be done instantly.

Connecting up payments to a website is usually not for the faint-hearted. But, the wizard tells Bob exactly what to do and where to do it. The wizard is ready, and so will be Bob when he follows the links.

13. Bob has passed the KYC requirements and has been given Pinch IDs!

Bob has successfully gone through all the hoops and is now the happy owner of some API credentials. What does he do with them? Well, just give them to the wizard and it will know what to do.

14. And that's all there is to it... Bob's Antiques is now ready to start accepting payments!

SyneMind now show the business as registered and ready to accept payments. There is now the option to add payers.

Note also the "sync" buttons - the "source of truth" is Pinch. Merchant, payer, and payment data is only "cached" at SyneMind, and can always be refreshed (updated) by clicking a button which will get the current status of everything from the Pinch API.

15. A payer record is created through the Pinch API

The payer is now created through Pinch API and has all the data fields to match.

In a future version (which was out of scope for the hackathon), Bob will be able to add notes and "to do" items to his payer records, which are stored in SyneMind.

16. The business dashboard shows all payers

The business dashboard shows all payers, and allows them to be "synced" (updated) in bulk.

17. Payer details allow update from API, and have an option to request a payment

The page where the payer's details are shown allows individual update from the API, and also the creation of a payment request ("payment link").

18. Payments are shown with payer's record

The payer's detail page now lists the payment link and its status. This can also be updated through the API, so that Bob can check if he received his money or not.

In a future version, this will work through processing of "webhook", whereby a POST request from Pinch will update the record and create an alert for Bob. This, however, was well out of scope for a two-day hackathon.

19. Bob has to email the payment link to his customers

Currently, Bob has to copy the payment link and paste it into an email to his customer. Apart from making things personal (and thus good, in this era of machine-induced anonymity), there is also a limitation that explain this feature. Namely, SyneMind has an email processor which does not allow the sending of arbitrary user-generated email texts, such as the payment description that Bob typed in. Again, this is a future improvement.

Note

No actual users were harmed during the creation of this demo. All visible user data is synthetic - automatically generated imitation.