For every transaction - whether it's a outgoing payment or incoming payment - there exists a counterparty; as the name implies, it's the entity (person or business) on the other side of the transaction.
In Brass, the counterparty for most payment-type resources can be one of:
- Account: These can only be used when dealing with Payments & Recurring Payment Mandates. This allows you to directly send money to an account - this is mostly useful when you're paying another Brass account as they only need to supply you their Account resource id.
- Contact: These are used when dealing with Payments & Recurring Payment Mandates; this is because the counterparty MUST have receiving account information and can either be saved to Brass (to take advantage of transfer fee exclusion) or left as an ordinary beneficiary on the contact list.
You'll be able to add Contacts by using the API, either by directly adding their information or inviting them. - Payer: These are created when dealing with Invoices and incoming funds as no receiving account information is required. You can't directly interact with Payer resources via the API as they're created as a side effect of either creating an invoice or receiving a credit into your account.