Before you start

You need your own eWAY account. Exacc does not hold your customers’ money at any point — card payments go directly to your eWAY account and settle into your bank account on eWAY’s normal timetable. If you do not have an account yet, sign up with eWAY first, then come back here.

Step 1 — Find your eWAY keys

Sign in to eWAY and go to My Account → API Key. That page shows four values. You only need the first two:

  • API Key — copy this.
  • Password — copy this. This is the API password shown on that page, not the password you use to sign in to eWAY.
  • Pay Now Button Public API Key — not needed.
  • Client Side Encryption Key — not needed.

The last two belong to other eWAY products. Exacc sends your customer to eWAY’s own secure payment page to type their card number, so card details never pass through Exacc and there is nothing for us to encrypt.

Step 2 — Enter the keys in Exacc

Go to Business details → Online Payments and find the eWAY panel. Paste in the API Key and Password, and choose what your customers will see on the payment page — “Credit or debit card” by default.

When you save, Exacc checks the key with eWAY straight away. If eWAY rejects it, nothing is stored and you can correct it. Once saved, the key is never shown again anywhere in Exacc — if it ever needs changing, you simply enter the new one.

Replacing a key later. If you enter a new key for the same eWAY account, nothing else changes. If it belongs to a different eWAY account, cards your customers saved against the old account can no longer be charged. When you replace a key and saved cards exist, the panel asks which it is — say so only if the account has genuinely changed, and those cards will be removed so your customers can enter them again.

Step 3 — Set up the accounts the payments go to

The eWAY panel lists anything still outstanding. There are three things to create, once:

  • A “Credit Card (eWAY)” payment method — so card payments are recognisable in your books.
  • An “eWAY Clearing” account — eWAY pays out in batches, after fees, a few days later. Payments sit here until the money lands in your bank, and the difference is your merchant fee. Without it, every card payment needs reconciling by hand.
  • A “Customer Prepayments” account — for money a customer pays before there is an invoice for it. It is money you owe them until an invoice exists, so it is held separately.

Step 4 — Switch it on

Once the key is verified and those three accounts exist, turn on Offer card payments to my customers. Until then the switch stays disabled and the panel tells you what is missing — a half-configured connection would show your customers a payment page that cannot record what it collects.

You can switch it off at any time. Your customers stop being offered the card option immediately; nothing else changes.

A note on testing

eWAY provides a sandbox for test payments that never move real money. In Exacc it is only available on demo business files, and deliberately so: on a real file it would show your customers a receipt and mark invoices as paid while no money ever arrived, and nobody would notice for weeks.

Surcharges

Exacc does not add a card surcharge and has no setting for one. From 1 October 2026 surcharging eftpos, Mastercard and Visa is banned in Australia, and American Express applies the same rule through its merchant agreement. Your customer pays the invoice amount, and the merchant fee is a cost your business absorbs — which is what the eWAY Clearing account above is for.