USTPay vs. ePay vs. Versapay: Choosing the Right Payment Solution for Business Central

Business Central handles inventory, the general ledger, and financial reporting natively, but it has no built-in way to run a credit card. That single gap has spawned an entire category of ISVs, and it's usually the last thing a migration team sorts out, well after the core modules are live and the pressure to finish the project is highest. Payment decisions made under that kind of time pressure tend to stick for years, mostly because unwinding one means touching stored card data, gateway contracts, and reconciliation workflows all at once.

That's what makes this category deceptive. USTPay, ePay, and Versapay all close the same native gap, and from a feature list they can look nearly interchangeable: all three authorize a card and post it to a cash receipts journal. But each one is solving the absence of native payments with a different architecture, and those architectural choices, not the feature lists, are what determine whether the integration still fits the business in three years.

Three Products, Three Different Bets

USTPay is built around gateway independence. It connects to more than 120 payment gateways through a single API, so a business keeps its existing merchant account and processor relationship rather than being pushed onto a new one during the Business Central migration. This model, often called BYOP or Bring Your Own Processor, means a company can add an international gateway, layer in redundancy, or switch processors later without a re-implementation. Card data is tokenized in a vault kept separate from the gateway itself, so a future processor switch doesn't mean losing control of stored customer cards, a detail covered further in USTPay's guide to switching payment processors.

ePay, listed on Microsoft AppSource, takes a narrower approach: a standalone extension that authorizes and captures payments from sales orders, invoices, and cash receipt journals, connected to a defined, smaller set of supported gateways. That's a reasonable shortcut for a company that wants one self-contained app and doesn't expect to touch its gateway configuration again. It's a harder fit the moment a business wants to keep an existing processor relationship intact or bring in a gateway outside that supported list, since doing so typically means a new setup rather than an addition.

Versapay is not really answering the same question. It's an accounts receivable automation platform, collections, cash application, a customer collaboration portal, with payment acceptance as one module inside a larger system. For a finance team whose real problem is days sales outstanding and manual reconciliation, that breadth can be valuable. For a business that just needs to process a card payment inside Business Central without re-platforming its entire AR process, it's considerably more system than the problem requires, and the implementation footprint reflects that.

What Actually Separates Them

Three factors tend to decide which of these fits a given business, and USTPay's architecture holds up well against all three.

Gateway and processor flexibility. This is the clearest dividing line in the category. USTPay's open, 120-plus gateway model means a business never has to unwind an existing processor relationship to adopt it, and can add or switch gateways later without a re-implementation. ePay and Versapay both operate within a narrower, defined set of supported payment rails, which can simplify initial setup but limits what happens if a business's processing needs change, whether that's international expansion, M&A, or simply wanting better pricing from a different processor.

Depth versus scope, matched to the actual problem. ePay is scoped tightly to payment capture inside Business Central. Versapay is scoped broadly across the entire AR lifecycle. USTPay sits in the payment-processing lane like ePay, but without the gateway constraints, giving a business the option to start narrow and expand later without switching vendors. Before evaluating any of these three, it's worth naming the actual problem: "we can't take a card payment inside Business Central" is a different problem than "our receivables process is manual," and the right tool depends on which one is real.

Security architecture and what happens after go-live. All three vendors tokenize cardholder data and operate under PCI DSS, which requires isolating tokenization systems from out-of-scope networks and making it computationally infeasible to recover a card number from a token, per PCI Security Standards Council guidance. Where they diverge is what happens to that token later. USTPay keeps its token vault independent of any single gateway by design, which is what makes its processor-switching claims possible rather than aspirational. It's worth asking any vendor directly where the token vault lives, who controls it, and what a processor change actually requires, since the answer determines how painful (or routine) a future migration will be. Microsoft's own guidance on managing marketplace apps in Business Central is a useful starting point for understanding how any of these extensions install, update, and interact with the core platform.

What This Means for a Shortlist

For a business migrating onto Business Central and trying to keep its existing credit card processing intact, USTPay's gateway-agnostic model directly removes the biggest source of migration risk: the merchant account and processor relationship stay exactly where they are while the ERP underneath them changes. Associations, nonprofits, and B2B companies juggling multiple gateways for redundancy or currency reasons tend to find this the deciding factor, a point covered further on USTPay's Business Central integrations page.

For a company that wants a single, turnkey extension and is comfortable committing to a narrower set of supported gateways up front, ePay's bundled approach can shorten the initial implementation timeline, though it's worth weighing that speed against the flexibility it trades away.

For a finance team whose core pain point is collections and cash application rather than payment capture itself, Versapay's broader AR automation platform addresses more of that workflow, at the cost of adopting a considerably larger system than payment processing alone requires.

Of the three, USTPay is the only one built specifically to avoid locking a Business Central customer into a single gateway, a single processor, or a single vendor's roadmap, which is exactly the kind of decision that's expensive to unwind once it's live. For most companies building a shortlist, that flexibility, combined with a support team that works exclusively on Business Central rather than splitting attention across ERPs, makes USTPay the strongest starting point.

If your team is ready to see how USTPay fits your specific gateway setup and migration timeline, connect with USTPay's team for a walkthrough. You'll talk with someone who actually works on Business Central integrations, not a general support queue, and you'll leave with a clear picture of what switching, or staying put, actually involves.