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Step 5: Test the Payment Portal — LocalGov IMS Walkthrough

Visit the citizen-facing payment portal and see how GOV.UK Pay integration works

Walkthrough progress

Step 5 of 5 • 3 minutes

Step 5 3 minutes

Test the Payment Portal

Visit the citizen-facing payment portal to see how residents interact with the system, and explore the GOV.UK Pay sandbox integration.

The citizen-facing Payment Portal where residents make payments. It integrates with GOV.UK Pay sandbox for test card payments.
The Windows Server 2022 EC2 instance (m5.xlarge) runs three IIS sites — Portal on port 80, Admin on port 8081, and API on port 8082.
Three CloudFront distributions provide HTTPS termination. Each points to the ALB on a different origin port.
RDS SQL Server Express (db.t3.medium) hosts the IncomeManagement database with EF6 migrations applied automatically on first boot.

Expected outcome

  • You can access the citizen-facing payment portal via its CloudFront URL
  • You understand how the portal integrates with GOV.UK Pay for card payments
  • You've seen the complete end-to-end payment flow

Visit the payment portal

  1. Find the PaymentPortalUrl in your CloudFormation stack outputs.
  2. Open it in your browser. The portal is the citizen-facing interface where residents make payments.
  3. The portal requires a valid payment reference to display the payment form. Without one, you'll see a "Payment Error" page — this is expected behaviour (citizens receive payment references in their council letters).

Understanding the payment flow

In a live deployment, the payment flow works like this:

  1. A citizen receives a council tax bill with a payment reference and a link to the payment portal.
  2. They visit the portal, enter their reference, and the system looks up their account and balance.
  3. The portal redirects to GOV.UK Pay where the citizen enters their card details (using the GOV.UK Pay sandbox in this demo).
  4. GOV.UK Pay processes the payment and redirects back to the portal with a confirmation.
  5. The IMS API records the transaction, updates the account balance, and the payment appears in the admin Transactions list.
GOV.UK Pay sandbox: This demo uses the GOV.UK Pay sandbox environment. In production, councils connect their live GOV.UK Pay account with real payment processing. The sandbox allows testing the full flow with test card numbers.

Explore the architecture

The deployment consists of:

  • Windows Server 2022 EC2 (m5.xlarge) running IIS with three sites — Portal, Admin, and API
  • RDS SQL Server Express hosting the IncomeManagement database with EF6 migrations
  • Application Load Balancer routing traffic to ports 80 (Portal), 8081 (Admin), and 8082 (API)
  • Three CloudFront distributions providing HTTPS termination for each interface
  • GOV.UK Pay sandbox API integration for card payment processing

Complete the walkthrough →

Need help?

If you're stuck, check the troubleshooting section or contact us.