Webhook delivery

Webhook delivery is the process by which one system notifies another that something changed. A payment processor might report that rent settled, or a PMS might report that a lease was updated. The notification is a prompt to inspect or process an event; it is not automatically proof that every downstream ledger, message, and dashboard now agrees.

A useful delivery record contains the provider, subscription, event type, event ID, account scope, provider event time, receipt time, signature result, acknowledgement time, processing state, and any replay. Store the minimum payload needed for diagnosis and avoid copying secrets or unnecessary resident data into logs.

Imagine a $1,700 rent payment changes from processing to paid while the accounting integration is unavailable. The provider retries the event. If the endpoint acknowledges before durably queuing it, the event can disappear. If every retry is processed as new, the ledger can receive duplicate entries. A safe handler authenticates, records, acknowledges promptly, and processes asynchronously with duplicate detection.

Ask a vendor whether events can arrive more than once or out of order, how long failed deliveries are retried, where an owner can see delivery history, and how missed events are reconciled from the source API. “Real time” describes expected speed; it does not answer those reliability questions.