Any payment platforms that I could trigger a payment from a google sheet?

[Spencer Mullaney]

Coming in with limited app script experience (more with VBA but still limited) but I can generally figure most of these things out.

Pretty opened ended question, but are there any payment platforms (venmo, square cash, google pay, zelle, etc) that could be triggered via some automated process in google sheets?

The purpose of this ask is for expense splitting (wife an I run separate accounts but balance everything each month end). Currently I just have a spreadsheet that runs all the numbers for balancing transactions at the end of each month to split costs, which is determined by tags and categories from a mint.com csv export. We then go through the spreadsheet, confirm it looks right, and on the summary page it says who charges/pays who for each transaction category to balance the accounts. This gets manually put into venmo transactions at the moment which is tedious to say the least and I would love to automate it.

The easiest answer is to just have a total and do one balancing payment/charge for whomever needs to pay the other to zero the month, but everything is broken down by budget category so you lose that detail if it just becomes one charge/payment per month.

I have the spreadsheet setup mostly how we want, and am experimenting using tiller money to just import directly to google sheets for financial stuff. The last cool step would be adding an approve/execute button that would parse the summary page and automatically charge/pay each of the category transactions via one of the apps out there on the market (I don't really care which one, whatever would work and would leave an audit trail so those balancing transactions show up in our bank accounts correctly).]

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Thanks

[Alan Wells]

Whatever service you choose would need to have a REST API.

Apps Script can make requests to the API using:

UrlFetchApp.fetch(url)

So, the first thing to do is find out if the service you want to use has a REST API.

This is assuming that requests will be made from the server, (script files with the .gs extension)

I don't know if there are any client side SDK's available.

If the service had a client side JavaScript library, you could use it from the HTML <script> tag 

in a sidebar or dialog box.

I use both PayPal or Stripe to accept customer payments, but it seems like you want something different.

With PayPal and Stripe you can use both client side code, and server side code.

First the payment authorization happens with the client side library and then you can make the actual transaction with server side code.

If the service has a JavaScript SDK, that's for client side use.

Even though Apps Script is run on JavaScript, I don't know of a way to use a JavaScript SDK from server side code.

So, is it possible?  Yes, and it could be easy or difficult depending upon the circumstances.

Like what's available for open source code and how good it is.

I'm providing a general overview but maybe someone has already written code for this.

Maybe look for GitHub repos.