Peach Payments links and your invoice numbers
What a South African business should check before sending Peach Payments links for invoices, including the letters-and-numbers rule for invoice IDs.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Running a business businesses in South Africa
Sending a customer an invoice with bank details at the bottom works, but it leaves the rest to them: open the banking app, add a beneficiary, type the amount, remember the reference. Many will do it next week. A payment link changes that. The customer taps, pays on a hosted page, and the money is on its way while the invoice is still open on their screen.
Peach Payments is one of the South African providers that offers this. Before you start sending links, though, a few details are worth settling, and one of them is easy to trip over: the format of the invoice number you attach to each link. This article walks through how Peach's links work, the options they give you, the invoice ID rule that applies where FNB is the acquirer, and how Achekam's own pay links fit alongside.
Links to a hosted page instead of bank details and a PDF
Peach Payments says its Payment Links product lets merchants send customers links to a secure hosted payment page by e-mail, SMS or WhatsApp, instead of sending bank details and a PDF invoice.
For a business, the gain is mostly about friction and matching. The customer pays without retyping anything, and each link can carry the amount and the invoice it relates to, which makes the payment much easier to identify. For the customer, the hosted page is a familiar checkout rather than a set of bank details to copy.
Peach's Payment Links overview explains how to create and send links by e-mail, SMS or WhatsApp, through the dashboard or the API, and it is the page to read before you set the product up.
Single links, batches and terms of service
Peach Payments says merchants can generate single payment links or batches of up to 1000, and can require customers to accept terms of service before paying.
Each option suits a different situation:
- Single links fit one-off invoices: a quote accepted, a job completed, a deposit requested.
- Batches fit businesses that bill many customers at once, such as a school sending fee statements at the start of term or a body corporate sending monthly levies.
- Terms of service are useful where the payment carries conditions, for example a deposit that is non-refundable after a certain date. Requiring acceptance before payment gives you a record that the customer saw the terms.
Whichever you use, decide who in the business creates links, who checks the amounts and who handles queries when a customer says a link did not work.
Letters and numbers only where FNB is the acquirer
This is the detail that catches people. Peach Payments says that where FNB is the acquirer, invoice IDs on payment links may only contain letters and numbers, with no special characters.
Many businesses number their invoices with separators: a prefix and a hyphen, a slash between year and number, a dot. Those are special characters. If your Peach account is acquired through FNB and you use your invoice number as the invoice ID on a link, a number like that may not be accepted as it stands.
Before you send your first link, find out from Peach which bank acquires your account. If it is FNB, check your invoice number format against the rule, and choose one of two approaches: change the format going forward, or agree a consistent way of turning each invoice number into a letters-and-numbers ID so the payment can still be traced back to the invoice.
Choosing an invoice number format in Settings
In Achekam, customer invoices are created as drafts that can be changed or deleted. Issuing one takes the next number in its sequence and posts it to the ledger as debtors, sales and output VAT. The number format is set in Settings, and default payment terms are 30 days.
That makes the start of a financial year, or the point at which you begin using payment links, a natural moment to choose a format that will work everywhere your invoice numbers travel. A format of letters and digits only, with no hyphens, slashes or dots, avoids the FNB issue on Peach's own links entirely. Change the format before issuing the next invoice, not in the middle of a run, so the sequence stays easy to follow.
Achekam's own pay links for issued invoices
Achekam also creates pay links of its own. A business can create a payment link for an issued customer invoice, copy it or e-mail it with the invoice, and the customer pays on a public page that shows the business's name and branding. There is no link for a draft or a voided invoice. A link lasts 14 days by default, and the period can be set anywhere from 1 to 720 hours; an open link for the same amount is reused rather than duplicated.
Through Peach, a business can take hosted-checkout payments in ZAR, USD, EUR, KES or MUR, which helps where some customers are billed in currencies other than rand. A verified payment is recorded as a receipt against the invoice it settles, and the invoice shows as paid or part-paid, so the receipt sits in the same books as the sale. The wider set-up, including how payments are verified before an invoice is marked paid, is covered in online payments on your invoices, and connecting Peach or another provider is explained in setting up your payment gateway.
A pre-launch checklist
- Confirm which bank acquires your Peach account.
- If it is FNB, check that your invoice numbers contain only letters and numbers, or agree how IDs will be formed.
- Decide whether links need terms of service, and draft them.
- Set the invoice number format in Settings before the next invoice is issued.
- Send a test link to yourself and pay it, then trace the payment back to the invoice.
Settle these once, and every link you send after that carries a number your bank, Peach and your books all recognise.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
