Key concepts

Money Movement is built on a small set of primitives: a wallet that holds your balance, a ledger that records every change to that balance, and transfers that move funds in or out. Read it once and the rest of this section stops feeling like a collection of unrelated APIs.

Wallets and balances

A wallet is the account that holds your funds on PayMongo. Every wallet has a status that controls whether it can transact: activated, deactivated, or frozen.

Your wallet has an available balance — the funds you can move right now to send a disbursement or transfer between wallets. Inbound funds become available once they finish settling at the rail; this happens in the background and is reflected in the balance you see.

The ledger

Every change to a wallet's balance is recorded as a ledger transaction made up of two or more entries — one credit, one debit — that always sum to zero. This is the same double-entry model used in financial accounting: a payout out of your wallet is a debit on your wallet account and a credit on the settlement account; a payment landing in your wallet is the reverse. The ledger is the source of truth for both the dashboard and your reconciliation feed.

Transfers

There is one resource for moving money — the transfer — and three things that distinguish one transfer from another:

• Direction — inward (funds coming into a wallet), outward (funds leaving a wallet), or inhouse (wallet-to-wallet within PayMongo).
• Type — domestic_intrabank (sender and recipient on the same bank), domestic_interbank (different banks within the Philippines).
• Provider — the rail that carries the money: instapay, pesonet, paymongo.

When you need to send many transfers at once — payroll, marketplace seller payouts, scheduled supplier runs — you can group up to 1,000 of them into a batch transfer. Batches are processed and tracked as a single unit but each underlying transfer still has its own status.

Rails: InstaPay, PESONet, and others

Domestic transfers in the Philippines run on one of two BSP-supervised rails — InstaPay or PESONet — and the choice changes both timing and limits.

• InstaPay — real-time, 24/7, suited for lower per-transaction amounts. Use when speed matters more than batching.
• PESONet — batch-cleared, business hours, suited for higher amounts and bulk runs. Use when amount or volume matters more than instant arrival.

Other providers serve different paths: paymongo handles internal wallet-to-wallet movement (no external rail involved). When you create a transfer you can specify a provider.

How a PESONet cycle works

PESONet is batch-cleared, so a transfer doesn't move the moment you submit it — it moves at the next cycle. PayMongo participates in three cycles per banking day, at 11:00, 14:00, and 17:00 (Manila time), Monday through Friday. Holidays and weekends are non-clearing days; transfers submitted then settle at the first cycle of the next banking day.

The cycle works the same in both directions:

• Outbound — disbursements you submit between cycles are bundled into a single batch, sent to PESONet at the next cycle, then status is reconciled per transfer once the batch is acknowledged.
• Inbound — funds sent to your wallet via PESONet from another bank arrive at the cycle following the sender's bank submission. They land in your available balance after the cycle clears.

Notes:

• A disbursement submitted at 14:30 will be sent at the 17:00 cycle, not immediately. Submitting at 17:01 means it waits until 11:00 the next banking day.

Status lifecycle

A transfer moves through three states:

• pending — accepted by PayMongo, not yet confirmed by the rail.
• succeeded — terminal success; the corresponding ledger transaction is posted.
• failed — terminal failure; no balance change occurred.

Limits

Every wallet has direction-aware limits — separate caps for inward and outward volume — tracked daily and monthly. Limits scale with your wallet type and the rail you use. Hitting a limit fails the transfer at submission, not mid-flight; check the wallet's running totals before issuing high-volume runs.

Glossary

• Wallet — the account that holds funds for a merchant in a single currency.
• Available balance — funds you can move right now.
• Ledger transaction — an atomic, double-entry accounting record made of two or more entries (credit + debit) that always balance to zero.
• Transfer — the single resource that represents any money movement (inward, outward, or in-house).
• Direction — inward, outward, or inhouse. Determines which wallet is debited and which is credited.
• Provider — the rail or system handling the transfer (instapay, pesonet, paymongo).
• InstaPay — BSP-supervised real-time domestic transfer rail.
• PESONet — BSP-supervised batch domestic transfer rail.
• Batch transfer — a container for up to 1,000 transfers processed as one unit.
• Wallet type — the tier that determines limits and available features.