Your WhatsApp Business Account

A WABA — WhatsApp Business Account — is the Meta-managed account that gives a business access to the WhatsApp Business API. Connect yours to Akedly and messages go out from your number, under your business name.

View in dashboardChannels → Setup → WhatsApp Setup

Connect your account and follow its setup checklist.

What connecting it changes

For OTP authentication

Optional, and an upgrade. Without it, OTPs still send — over Akedly's shared WhatsApp number. With it:

Recipients see your business name rather than Akedly's, which lifts trust and open rates.
You reach nine destinations the shared number cannot (below).
Meta's per-message charge is deducted from your Akedly bill rather than added on top, so you are not billed twice for the same conversation.

For Utilities

Not optional. Utility WhatsApp is only ever sent from your own WABA — there is no shared-number path for it.

With no active, credentialed WABA on the account, WhatsApp is simply not a feasible channel for a utility send: the message resolves to SMS if your BYO SMS routing covers the destination, and otherwise fails.

Utility templates also need Meta approval, which runs against your WABA.

Nine destinations the shared number cannot reach

Meta compliance policy blocks Akedly's shared WhatsApp number from sending to Indonesia (+62), India (+91), Egypt (+20), Malaysia (+60), Nigeria (+234), Pakistan (+92), Saudi Arabia (+966), South Africa (+27), and the UAE (+971).

Without your own WABA, an OTP to one of these skips WhatsApp and uses the next channel in the pipeline — Telegram or SMS. Connecting your WABA unlocks all nine.

Connect it

Connection runs through Meta's Embedded Signup, the flow Meta provides for linking a Business Account to a platform. It opens in a popup, you sign in with Facebook, pick or create the WABA and the phone number, and come back. It takes under two minutes.

You need the whatsapp:update permission to connect or disconnect; whatsapp:read is enough to view the page.

Two things Meta requires before it will work

A payment method on your WABA. WhatsApp Business API uses conversation-based pricing billed by Meta. Without a valid payment method attached, messages fail to send. Add one in Meta Business Suite under Billing — that payment goes to Meta, not to Akedly.
Business Verification. A one-time identity check Meta requires before a business may create authentication templates. Around nine in ten businesses have to complete it. Start it in Meta Business Suite under Settings → Security Center; it usually takes a few business days.

The five setup steps

The dashboard tracks connection as a five-step checklist and shows how many remain. All five green means "ready to send from your WhatsApp".

Name
Register phone number
Type
step
Description
The number is registered with the WhatsApp Business API. If a WABA holds several numbers, one is the primary sender — you can sync the list and change which is primary from the page.
Name
WABA connected
Type
step
Description
Akedly holds a live access token for the Business Account. This is what Embedded Signup produces.
Name
Business verified
Type
step
Description
Meta Business Verification is complete. Until it is, creating an authentication template fails with "Application does not have permission".
Name
Payment method
Type
step
Description
No billing problem is blocking the account on Meta's side.
Name
OTP template send-ready
Type
step
Description
Akedly creates an authentication template for you during setup and submits it to Meta. Review is usually minutes. A template can be approved in one language while another variant is still pending.

When something goes wrong

The page carries a health check for your own WABA and lets you retry the two steps that fail most: template creation and phone registration.

A message that routed to SMS is usually not a WABA fault

The most common cause is that the recipient's number is not on WhatsApp at all — Meta returns error 131026 and Akedly falls back to the next channel so the OTP still arrives. That is by design. The health check deliberately flags only real sender-side problems — billing, templates, account holds — not recipient-not-on-WhatsApp cases.

For OTP, a broken WABA is not an outage: if your template is rejected, your phone fails to register, or Meta blocks the account, Akedly fills in with its shared number and the service continues. Utilities has no such safety net — a WABA problem stops utility WhatsApp until it is fixed. The one exception is narrow and opt-in: a pipeline with the WhatsApp → SMS fallback enabled re-routes a delivery that fails with 131042 (business eligibility or payment) to your own SMS provider. A rejected template (131045) or an account hold (131057) is still terminal.

Disconnecting

Disconnecting is reversible and loses no data; you can reconnect later. What changes:

OTP falls back to Akedly's shared WhatsApp number automatically. Service is not interrupted.
Utilities loses WhatsApp entirely, and sends resolve to SMS or fail.

Where it is used

Utilities → Get set up — step 1 of the utility setup.
Utilities → Channels — the conditions a utility WhatsApp send has to meet.
Pipeline Setup → Verification Methods — where WhatsApp sits in an OTP pipeline's channel order.
Utility webhooks — the delivery, reply and button events Meta reports back against your WABA.

If WhatsApp is not the right channel for a destination, connect your own SMS provider instead — or as well. If Akedly already operates a managed Vodafone integration for your account, its coverage is fixed to Egypt.