Document upload best practices for business docs

[Seth_Duda]

If business docs are requested (for verified business customers), we’ve been running into many customers where proof of address are needed. However, there’s no way to know if this is needed up front or even after an EIN letter has been submitted and reviewed.

What are best practices here? Always request our customers upload POA up front? Wait until an EIN doc is uploaded and reviewed, and id business docs are still request, upload a POA? Reach out to support every time customers appear to be stuck on KYB?

[shreya (Shreya | Developer Advocate @ Dwolla)]

Hi @Seth_Duda!

If you are finding that there are quite a few businesses that we require Proof of Address from then it’s a good idea to require those documents up front! You can use the component even after they have already uploaded the initially required documents for the controller, the business or both. This component will continue accepting docs as long as the Customer is in a document status. Here’s how you can invoke the component with an existing customer:

<dwolla-business-vcr 
    terms="{{ your_terms }}" 
    privacy="{{ your_privacy-policy }}"
    customerId="{{ customerId }}">
</dwolla-business-vcr>

If this doesn’t suffice, you can reach out to our support team to understand if anything is amiss! Hope this helps!

[Seth_Duda]

If you need to upload multiple business docs, the issue I can see running into this is that it requires the customer to upload another controller doc before you can get to the business doc upload screen (in the scenario where both controller and business docs are needed). The customer would get stuck trying to upload the same controller doc again (it won’t let you), or would get confused uploading an unrelated document for controller just to get to the business doc screen.

I’ve also heard that there’s a defect with the standalone document upload drop-in component. It only lets you upload one document at a time and must wait for it to be approved / rejected.

It seems like there’s no great option using drop in components for document upload when multiple docs are needed. Do you have any other recommendation, beyond building out our own UI for document upload?

[shreya (Shreya | Developer Advocate @ Dwolla)]

Hi @Seth_Duda, as yes, that is accurate and definitely something to consider given how our API behaves and how the drop-ins are set up.

Keeping these shortcomings in mind, as a workaround, I would recommend checking that both docs for the Business and the Controller have been reviewed and accepted but the Business Customer is still in a document status. Then using the <dwolla-document-upload> drop-in to collect the POA document.

To find the document verification status of the documents, you can make the following call to the API -

Request / Response example

GET https://api-sandbox.dwolla.com/customers/06a64a19-8f45-4c59-929c-3e747d16c5c2/documents

...

{
    "_links": {
        "self": {
            "href": "https://api-sandbox.dwolla.com/customers/06a64a19-8f45-4c59-929c-3e747d16c5c2/documents",
            "type": "application/vnd.dwolla.v1.hal+json",
            "resource-type": "document"
        }
    },
    "_embedded": {
        "documents": [
            {
                "_links": {
                    "self": {
                        "href": "https://api-sandbox.dwolla.com/documents/9f62e773-fe95-45c7-bad0-274208b2ab1f",
                        "type": "application/vnd.dwolla.v1.hal+json",
                        "resource-type": "document"
                    }
                },
                "id": "9f62e773-fe95-45c7-bad0-274208b2ab1f",
                "status": "reviewed",
                "type": "license",
                "created": "2024-06-10T21:50:13.000Z",
                "documentVerificationStatus": "accepted"
            },
            {
                "_links": {
                    "self": {
                        "href": "https://api-sandbox.dwolla.com/documents/6c84d16d-ba2e-4ab9-9fb5-39e9ea555991",
                        "type": "application/vnd.dwolla.v1.hal+json",
                        "resource-type": "document"
                    }
                },
                "id": "6c84d16d-ba2e-4ab9-9fb5-39e9ea555991",
                "status": "reviewed",
                "type": "other",
                "created": "2024-06-10T21:50:19.000Z",
                "documentVerificationStatus": "accepted"
            }
        ]
    },
    "total": 2
}

This is what the <dwolla-document-upload> component looks like when all uploaded docs have been reviewed but Customer hasn’t been verified.

Hope this helps! Eventually, we do plan on making the API and drop-in behavior seamless and intuitive. However, as of right now, we recommend these workarounds in place of calling the API directly to upload a document.

Let us know if you have any questions!

[Seth_Duda]

Thanks, very helpful feedback! I suspect we’ll be heading down the path of creating our own file upload UI soon (the drop in components could benefit from a lot of improvements), but hopefully we can get some more mileage out of the drop in components using this info.

[shreya (Shreya | Developer Advocate @ Dwolla)]

That sounds good, @Seth_Duda! Thanks for the feedback!

In the meantime, let us know if we can help with anything!