Setting up, end to end

The page-by-page guides answer “what does this screen do”. This one answers “what do I do first”, and it is the only page here written as a sequence.

Nothing below is optional in the sense of being skippable: each step unlocks the one after it, and the platform refuses the later ones outright rather than half-working. The whole run takes an afternoon of your time, plus however long our review of your documents takes.

The four facts that gate live money

Read these first, because every step below exists to satisfy one of them. A live charge is refused unless all four hold:

Must be true	Set by	Where
A pricing plan is attached to the account	Us	Ask your account contact; the symptom is every transaction refused as unpriced
Verification is at the level the scope needs	You file, we review	Verification
A settlement destination exists and is verified	You add it, we verify it	Settlement destinations
Live is activated on the account	Us, under dual control	Requested by our staff once the three above hold

Until the fourth, the environment switch in the top bar refuses to move and says so: “Live payments are not activated on this account yet.” That switch is the clearest signal of where you are in this run.

None of it gates the sandbox

Test moves no money, so the whole integration — collections, payouts, refunds, webhooks — is buildable and testable at verification level 0, with no document filed, no destination added and no channel switched on for you: a test key works on mobile money, bank and card from the day the account opens. Build first; verify in parallel.

1. Get an account, and get into it

You are…	Do this	Read
The first person at your business	/signup — two steps: the business, then you. You become the owner.	Opening an account
Being added by a colleague	Follow the invitation link in your email. If you already sign in to PaySigna with that address, accept with your existing password.	Accepting an invitation
Already on PaySigna, and starting a separate business	/signup with the email you already use, and your existing password. The business is added to your sign-in.	Signing up with an email you already use
Adding another app or brand of a business that is already here	Account → Accounts → Open an account, from the existing account. It shares the company’s verification.	Accounts

If you were invited, do not use /signup

Signing up creates a brand new, unrelated merchant account — your colleague’s invitation stays pending, and you end up with two businesses on the platform, one of them empty. The invitation link is the only way into an existing account.

One sign-in covers every account you hold. You never need a second login for a second business — switch between them from the account menu. See Switching account.

Two things from signup are permanent and worth getting right: the account code, which is printed on reconciliation files and never changed (you do not need it to sign in), and the country and settlement currency, both immutable after creation. Everything else on the profile is editable later.

Then confirm your email. Until you do, the console sends you to the confirmation screen, and you can read but not change anything. Confirming sends the account’s opener a welcome email (“Welcome to PaySigna: your first steps”) with the steps on this page, each linked. Then turn on two-factor authentication from Settings. The Team page marks every colleague who has not — you do not want to be that row.

2. Add a second person, before you need one

A single account holder is an outage waiting for a lost phone. Invite at least one other person from Your team, and give them a role rather than sharing yours — there are five, and they are enforced rather than advisory.

An invitation lapses after 48 hours and there is no resend, so send it when the person is around to accept it.

3. Build against test

Step	Page
Mint a test API key. Every scope is grantable at level 0.	API keys
Register a test webhook endpoint and store its signing secret.	Webhooks
Make your first charge.	Quickstart

The key and the secret are each shown once, in a panel that only closes when you say you have stored the value. There is no second viewing and no recovery — only a fresh key.

Test and live share nothing: not keys, not endpoints, not signing secrets, not history. A psg_test_… key cannot touch live data, and the test endpoints you register now will not receive live events. You will do this step again in live.

4. Add a settlement destination

This is the step people leave until last and should not, because it has a dependency outside your control: it has to be verified, by a name enquiry at the bank or network.

Step	Notes
Add destination	From the Settlements header or the Withdraw form. Bank account or mobile money — two genuinely different records.
Enter the account name exactly as the bank holds it	—
Choose the bank or network	Only banks we can pay out to are listed. If yours is missing, ask us.
Wait for Verified	Usually within minutes: we ask the bank or network who holds the account, and if it matches your registered business name the destination is verified automatically. Otherwise our team reviews it, usually within one working day.
Make default	Only available once verified. One default per currency.

An unverified destination is the most expensive thing in this portal

A payout to a wrong-but-valid account number goes somewhere, and it does not come back. If the confirmed name differs from the one you entered — even by one character — read it before making that destination default. A one-character difference is a transposed account number.

Without a verified destination, money collected has nowhere to go: withdrawals and settlements are impossible, and in live the charge itself is refused with settlement_destination_missing.

5. Apply for a verification level

Verification is four acts: apply for a level, give your Ghana Card number and upload the other documents, send it for review, then wait. The Ghana Card is never photographed or uploaded — the law forbids copying it, and we check the number with NIA. Pick the level by what you need to do, not by thoroughness:

You need to…	Minimum level
Collect from customers, store customers, run name enquiries	1 — Basic
Send payouts, issue refunds, carry higher limits	2 — Standard
Trade at high value, or in a higher-risk category	3 — Enhanced

The scope list on the live key-creation form is narrowed to what your level carries, so a level-1 account cannot mint a live key with payout.create on it — the form shows the shortened list rather than letting you create a key production would refuse.

Levels 1 and 2 stand for 24 months, level 3 for 12. The expiry is on the tab, and lapsed verification stops live traffic as surely as never having filed.

6. Go live

When the plan, the verification and the verified destination are all in place, our staff raise a go-live request — two people on our side have to agree to it, so it is not instant. When it completes, the environment switch unlocks.

Then, in live:

1. Mint a live key (psg_live_…), scoped to what your level carries.
2. Register your live webhook endpoint and store the new signing secret.
3. Point the integration at api.paysigna.com and put one real, small payment through end to end before you announce anything.

Going live is the API-side version of this step.

7. What the week then looks like

Rhythm	Page
Daily — what came in, what failed	Transactions, Dashboard
Daily — what is actually spendable	Balances
Weekly — what was paid out, and the fees against it	Settlements
As needed — moving money out ahead of a settlement	Withdrawals
As they arrive — refunds and disputes, both deadline-bound	Refunds, Disputes

How a record behaves here, and why

The same few principles sit under every screen, and knowing them makes the portal predictable rather than surprising.

Nothing that affected money is edited or deleted. A refund, a settlement, a dispute, a revoked key all stay readable after the fact. A record that moved money is a historical fact, and rewriting it would make what already happened unexplainable.

A reason is part of the record, not a formality. Where the portal asks why, that text is stored, and it may be read by us, by our auditors, or quoted back to you in a support conversation months later.

Secrets exist once. Keys and signing secrets are shown at creation and never again. The mechanism is replacement, not recovery.

Test and live are separate worlds, always. When a number here disagrees with what your integration reports, check which environment each of you is in before anything else. It is the explanation more often than not.

A table footer holds the API’s totals over your whole filter, not a sum of the rows on screen. The two will not agree, and the footer is the one to quote.