Recording customer payments

A customer payment is an incoming remittance from a shipper/customer applied against their receivable invoices. It has two levels:

The payment (pym_…) — the money that arrived: an amount, a currency, a transaction date, and the check/ACH reference it came in on.
Its line items (pli_…) — how that money is split across your invoices. Each line item applies an amount to a specific invoice (inv_…) for a specific customer (cus_…).

This page covers creating a payment with its line items, reading it back, and reconciling it against receivables.

This is the accounts-receivable (money in) side. For paying carriers (money out) the resource is bill-payments, which is a separate endpoint family. For the AR concepts behind these records — reconciliation, short-pays, and the like — see Remittances Management and Accounts Receivable Management.

All amounts are integer cents. totalAmount: 1120000 is $11,200.00, not eleven million dollars. This matches every monetary field in the Upwell API.

Create a payment with its line items

The primary flow is a single POST /api/rest/customer_payments that inserts the payment and its line items together, using a nested paymentLineItems.data array:

curl -X POST https://api.upwell.com/api/rest/customer_payments \
  -H "Authorization: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
        "input": {
          "totalAmount": 1120000,
          "transactionDate": "2026-07-07",
          "currency": "USD",
          "checkOrAchNumber": "CHK004321",
          "checkDate": "2026-07-07",
          "sourceSystem": "aljex",
          "sourceSystemId": "REMIT-88123",
          "paymentLineItems": {
            "data": [
              {
                "invoiceId": "inv_jkMtQfYE",
                "customerId": "cus_kCRVpEUv",
                "totalAmount": 1120000,
                "status": "applied",
                "transactionDate": "2026-07-07"
              }
            ]
          }
        }
      }'
# -> { "createCustomerPayment": {
#      "id": "pym_LQ-3Nnmq", "totalAmount": 1120000, "currency": "USD",
#      "checkOrAchNumber": "CHK004321", "transactionDate": "...", "createdAt": "...", "updatedAt": "...",
#      "paymentLineItems": [
#        { "id": "pli_qi9RW1Pd", "invoiceId": "inv_jkMtQfYE", "customerId": "cus_kCRVpEUv",
#          "totalAmount": 1120000, "status": "applied", "createdAt": "...", "updatedAt": "..." } ] } }

When line items are nested under the payment like this, omit paymentId on each line item — the parent payment supplies the link. Fields you don’t set come back null.

Required fields

Level	Required	Notes
Payment	`totalAmount`, `transactionDate`	`currency` defaults to `USD` if omitted. `id`, timestamps, and tenant are set for you.
Line item	`totalAmount`, `transactionDate`, `status`	Add `invoiceId` (+ `customerId`) to actually apply the amount to a receivable.

Field reference

Payment (pym_…)

Field	Meaning
`totalAmount`	Amount received, in cents.
`currency`	ISO-4217 code (`CurrencyCodeEnum`, e.g. `USD`). Defaults to `USD`.
`transactionDate`	Date the payment was transacted (`YYYY-MM-DD`).
`checkOrAchNumber` / `checkDate`	The check or ACH reference and its date.
`status`	Optional payment-level status — see below.
`sourceSystem` / `sourceSystemId`	Your system’s identifier for this remittance — see idempotency.
`paymentLineItems`	Nested `{ "data": [ … ] }` array of line items.

Line item (pli_…)

Field	Meaning
`totalAmount`	Amount applied to the invoice, in cents.
`fees`	Fees withheld, in cents (defaults to `0`).
`invoiceId`	The receivable invoice (`inv_…`) this amount is applied to.
`customerId`	The customer (`cus_…`) the payment is from.
`status`	Free-form line-item state — see below.
`transactionDate`	Date the line item was transacted (`YYYY-MM-DD`).

The line-item amounts don’t have to sum to the payment’s totalAmount — a remittance can be partially applied and reconciled later. For the complete, always-current column list, see the customer_payments and customer_payment_line_items entries in the API Reference.

Two different `status` fields

These are not the same field, and the difference matters:

Payment status is optional and drawn from PaymentStatusesEnum: PENDING, SUCCEEDED, FAILED, DISPUTED, REFUNDED, PAYMENT_REVERSED. Most payments leave it unset.
Line-item status is a required free-form string, not a fixed enum. In practice it carries reconciliation states like applied, paid, or completed. Don’t assume a closed set of values or a fixed casing — read it as an opaque string and set whatever your workflow uses.

Read payments back

# List (newest-first not guaranteed — use search for ordering)
curl "https://api.upwell.com/api/rest/customer_payments?limit=50" \
  -H "Authorization: YOUR_API_KEY"
# -> { "customerPayments": [ { "id": "pym_…", … } ] }

# One payment
curl https://api.upwell.com/api/rest/customer_payments/pym_LQ-3Nnmq \
  -H "Authorization: YOUR_API_KEY"
# -> { "customerPayment": { "id": "pym_LQ-3Nnmq", … } }

To filter or sort, use POST /api/rest/customer_payments/search with a Hasura-style where:

curl -X POST https://api.upwell.com/api/rest/customer_payments/search \
  -H "Authorization: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "where": { "sourceSystemId": { "_eq": "REMIT-88123" } },
        "orderBy": { "createdAt": "DESC" }, "limit": 10, "offset": 0 }'
# -> { "customerPayments": [ … ] }

Create many at once

POST /api/rest/bulk-customer-payments inserts an array of payments in one call. The response is a Hasura mutation envelope — read the created rows from returning:

curl -X POST https://api.upwell.com/api/rest/bulk-customer-payments \
  -H "Authorization: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "inputs": [ { "totalAmount": 3300, "transactionDate": "2026-07-08" },
                    { "totalAmount": 23880, "transactionDate": "2026-07-08" } ] }'
# -> { "createCustomerPayments": { "returning": [ { "id": "pym_…", … } ] } }

Update and delete

# Update — body carries an input object; id comes from the path
curl -X PUT https://api.upwell.com/api/rest/customer_payments/pym_LQ-3Nnmq \
  -H "Authorization: YOUR_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "input": { "checkOrAchNumber": "1234567890" } }'
# -> { "updateCustomerPayment": { "id": "pym_LQ-3Nnmq", "checkOrAchNumber": "1234567890", … } }

# Delete
curl -X DELETE https://api.upwell.com/api/rest/customer_payments/pym_LQ-3Nnmq \
  -H "Authorization: YOUR_API_KEY"
# -> { "deleteCustomerPayment": { "id": "pym_LQ-3Nnmq" } }

Line items on their own

If you’d rather attach line items to an existing payment (or manage them independently), use the line-item endpoints directly — GET/POST /api/rest/customer_payment_line_items and .../customer_payment_line_items/{id}. Here, set paymentId explicitly to link the line item to its payment:

curl -X POST https://api.upwell.com/api/rest/customer_payment_line_items \
  -H "Authorization: YOUR_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "input": { "paymentId": "pym_LQ-3Nnmq", "invoiceId": "inv_jkMtQfYE",
                   "customerId": "cus_kCRVpEUv", "totalAmount": 1120000,
                   "status": "applied", "transactionDate": "2026-07-07" } }'
# -> { "createCustomerPaymentLineItem": { "id": "pli_qi9RW1Pd", … } }

Idempotency and deduplication

If you set sourceSystem and sourceSystemId, the pair is unique per tenant (there’s a uniqueness constraint on (tenant_id, source_system, source_system_id) for both payments and line items). Use your own remittance/transaction reference as sourceSystemId so re-posting the same remittance conflicts instead of creating a duplicate — a simple idempotency key for retried imports.

Testing against staging? Use the staging base URL https://staging.api.upwell.com with your staging API key — the paths are identical.

For the complete, always-current request and response schemas, see the customer_payments and customer_payment_line_items entries in the API Reference. To submit carrier invoices (the payables side) instead, see Submitting carrier invoices via API.

​Recording customer payments

​Create a payment with its line items

​Required fields

​Field reference

​Two different status fields

​Read payments back

​Create many at once

​Update and delete

​Line items on their own

​Idempotency and deduplication

Recording customer payments

Create a payment with its line items

Required fields

Field reference

Two different `status` fields

Read payments back

Create many at once

Update and delete

Line items on their own

Idempotency and deduplication