Introduction

When you set up a Slate Payments deposit account (the holding account on the Slate Payments platform), you are also asked to specify an external bank account to which the collected funds should be sent. These transactions are called payouts or transfers. The same external bank account may be used for multiple deposit accounts. You can determine a schedule for automatic payouts to these external accounts (every day, once per week on a specified day, once per month on a specified day). We recommend a weekly or longer-dated schedule.

The very first transfer/payout to your external bank account may take up to 7 business days to post. For US-based accounts, a transfer to your account will include all transactions that "cleared" prior to 21:00 UTC (typically 5 PM Eastern) two days before the transaction (e.g. on Thursday morning you'll receive a transfer of all funds received/cleared as of 5 PM Tuesday).

For non-US accounts the delay before a transaction is available for transfer will vary; in most countries other than the US, each transfer will include transactions from 7 days prior.

Finding Payout/Transfer records

Once payouts have started, you will be able to access the details in the 'Payouts/Transfers' section of the Payment history:

With recent updates at Stripe and how ACH payments information is collected (instant authentication and authorization by the user/payer at the time of initiation), funds are no longer separated out by ‘fund source’ on the Stripe side and all funds now go into the generic 'card balance'. This means that for more recent payouts you will only see one fund source and payout for a given scheduled date.

Payout/Transfer Details

A payout from Stripe to your bank account will usually take a few days to arrive, as would be the case for any other ACH-like transaction. We record when a payout was initiated and you will see expected/upcoming payouts in the transfers page and the expected arrival date in the details pop-up.

Testing

Are there payouts for test payments?

Test payments will not generate an actual test payout transaction to your external bank account, however Slate does simulate how a test payout would be recorded (and test payout records do appear in the Payouts/Transfers page).

Payout Failures and Errors

Payout Failures

If your bank can’t receive or process a payout for any reason, the funds are sent back to Stripe. It can take up to 5 additional business days for your bank to return the payout and to inform Stripe and Slate that it failed. If this happens, you’re notified by email. As a result it is possible that a payout status initially shows as paid but then subsequently changes to failed.

When a payout fails, you will see a detailed failure message to help you make adjustments:

Payout failures most frequently happen when the "two-way option" is selected, but your external bank account is not properly set up to allow the direct debit for the negative balance (or the debit was rejected by your account holder / finance team). In these cases, you will see the following message:

Follow the directions in this article to set up Two-way payouts: /v1/docs/slate-payments-account-balance

Resuming Payouts

When a particular payout fails, all subsequent payouts are on hold and generally do not resume automatically! While payouts are on hold, payment collection generally continues normally and incoming funds will continue to accumulate in your account.

1. First — follow the instructions to verify/update your external bank account information or settings.

2. Reach out and let us know that you completed the steps;

3. We will be able to check on the account status and often have to manually re-initiate the payouts.

The next payout will include the items contained in the previously failed attempt in addition to the newly accumulated funds.

Reconciliation

A given payout will contain all the relevant transactions for that deposit account regardless of how you categorize/separate "payment accounts" inside Slate (i.e. payment_account prompt values). If a given payment account prompt is configured to use the deposit account in question (See Step-3 from the setup guide), all relevant payment transactions will be included in the payout (including certain Stripe fee items related to recurring payments and even some system-initiated reversals or corrections).

The topline payout sum is always the correct amount. If you are finding a discrepancy between the topline payout sum and the sum of the net amounts of the included individual transactions (in the standard Excel export) please reach out to us (see next section).

Pre-filtered Payment History

There are 2 ways to see which individual payment items are included in a payout.

1.) Via the Payouts/Transfers search page, click on a particular payout record to see its details and then click the top link to see the individual payments that were bundled into the transfer:

You will then be able to separate out e.g. Application Fees, Event fees, or other types of fees and reconcile the details via the standard built-in Excel report from this pre-filtered payment history page. (Alternatively, you can create custom payments-based queries that can contain additional data points.)

2.) Via a the payment details pop-up — If a particular Received or Refunded payment has been associated with a payout, we will display a Payout ID, payout date and a link to the pre-filtered payment history, which displays the other transactions contained in that payout:

If you have specific reconciliation questions and it is necessary to open a support request, we will ask you to include the URL to this pre-filtered payment history to us.