PayFast Transaction Sync: automatic income tracking on Pro

What PayFast Transaction Sync actually does

A lot of our Pro users run more than one thing. They invoice consulting clients through SortedNexus, but they also run a separate SaaS product, an online course, or a membership site that charges customers directly through its own PayFast checkout. That income is real, it lands in the same bank account, and it belongs in the same set of books, but it never touches SortedNexus because no invoice was ever generated for it.

PayFast Transaction Sync connects your own PayFast merchant account, the one for that other product, and pulls its transaction history into your Cash Flow Tracker automatically. Every payment that actually came in shows up as an income entry, tagged with a label you choose, without you touching a spreadsheet or a bank statement. If PayFast took a commission on that sale, a matching expense entry lands right alongside it, no manual step required.

How the sync actually works

There is no webhook involved, because there is no account-level webhook PayFast lets a third party subscribe to. Instead, SortedNexus polls your connected merchant account's transaction history once a day, at 3am, and picks up anything new since the last check. The first sync after you connect looks back 30 days so you are not starting from a blank slate.

Every entry gets matched against PayFast's own payment ID before it is imported, so a transaction already synced never gets duplicated, even if you click Sync now in Settings right after the nightly run already picked it up. Only genuine credits count as income: PayFast marks every transaction with a Sign of either CREDIT or DEBIT, and anything that is not a CREDIT, a payout, a refund, a fee, is excluded rather than risked as income.

What it captures automatically, and what still needs you

Every synced sale imports as the gross amount, the full amount your customer paid. PayFast reports its own commission on that same transaction row, before the merchant can request payout of the remainder, and if that fee is non-zero, the sync logs it as its own expense entry too, category PayFast Commission/Fees. You end up with both sides of the transaction in your books automatically: what the customer paid, and what PayFast kept.

What still needs a manual entry: a refund or chargeback (PayFast marks these with a Sign the sync does not treat as income, so they are excluded rather than risked as a sale, but nothing gets logged in their place either) and PayFast's separate per-withdrawal payout fee, which is not tied to any one sale and so has nowhere natural to attach itself to automatically. Log both yourself in your Expense Tracker, the second one under its own PayFast Payout Fee category.

Your Cash Flow Tracker, and your Annual Financial Summary if you are on a registered company, now reflect that net position without you doing any of the subtraction by hand: the sale shows the full amount customers actually paid, and PayFast's cut shows up as its own line rather than disappearing into a single blended number.

Setting it up

Connecting an account takes one trip to Settings: your PayFast merchant ID, your PayFast passphrase, and a label so you can tell the income apart from anything else in your Cash Flow Tracker, something like "Course subscriptions" or "Product A". SortedNexus makes a small, real call to PayFast's own API with those credentials before saving the connection, so a typo or an expired passphrase gets caught immediately rather than failing silently every night.

From there it just runs. Every imported entry's description carries your label followed by PayFast's own transaction description, so a year from now you can still tell at a glance which product a given entry came from.

More than one product? Connect more than one account

PayFast merchant accounts are set up one per site, so if you run two or three separate products, each with its own PayFast checkout, you connect one row per product rather than trying to merge them. Each keeps its own label, its own sync history, and its own transactions, all landing in the same Cash Flow Tracker for the business they belong to. You can connect up to ten per business, which comfortably covers even a small portfolio of side products.

Each connection's commission entries land under the same PayFast Commission/Fees category regardless of which product they came from, so if you want to compare how much PayFast actually costs you per product, use the description (it always starts with the connection's label) rather than the category to tell them apart. See our guide to tracking business expenses for the rest of what's worth logging alongside this sync, like refunds and the payout fee.

Why this lives on Pro

Running a separate PayFast-connected product alongside your main invoicing is a Pro-shaped problem. It is also the same tier that unlocks the Annual Financial Summary, and that connection matters: once this sync brings in income that never touched a SortedNexus invoice, it counts toward that summary's revenue too, so a registered company's income statement is not missing an entire product line just because no invoice was ever generated for it.

Disclaimer: This article is for general information and does not constitute accounting or tax advice. PayFast Transaction Sync imports the gross sale amount and, where PayFast reported a non-zero fee on that transaction, a matching commission expense; refunds, chargebacks, and PayFast's separate payout fee are not captured automatically and must be recorded separately. Always confirm how these amounts should be categorised for your own books with a registered accountant or tax practitioner.