Which API and best practice for recurring payments with variable amounts

aferrara
Contributor
Contributor

I'm hoping someone in the community has implemented a similar approach using PayFlow Pro's APIs and can provide me a kick start on what APIs I should be looking for to accomplish the workflow.  Each day we need to perform a Sale transaction for an amount that will be calculated based on activity and therefore will be different each day.  This is a completely unattended process with no website involved.  FWIW both customers are PayFlow Pro customers if that helps, but the initial idea for the architecture was based on my previous experience with Authorize.Net CIM.  In discussing this with the PayPal support team they described a similar approach as being available but I can't quite glue the pieces together in regard to which set of APIs and process to follow.  These are two companies who are selling each other's products online so the assumption is they will authorize their card to be automatically charged each day in whatever manner is required by either the billing or recurring payments APIs we end up using. Here is the desired flow:

 

- Each day company A will owe company B a variable amount of money, initially it will be in the low hundreds each day FWIW

- We have a business process that calculates the amount each day

- I would like to interject the daily charge into the code so that once per day at the appropriate time, the daily charge is passed to Company B through PayFlow Pro APIs

- I do not want to store credit card information inside my application if it is avoidable.  Back to Authorize.Net CIM, the key was to do this:

 

-- Create a customer, along with the credit card data in the CIM portal, one-time

-- This generated a reference ID for the *customer* which in their system then tied things to the card

-- Each charge issued subsequently only needed to have the customer ID to perform the sale transaction

 

I'm looking to replicate this in PayFlow Pro and can't tell if a) this functionality fully exists, b) can I setup a linked customer profile similarly, and c) it appears some of this is only available in the SOAP APIs.  Your guidance is greatly appreciated.

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