Introduction

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

The very first transfer/payout to your external bank account may take up to 7 days to post. For US-based accounts, each 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 Transfer records

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

 
When Stripe originally released support for ACH in 2015, they had to introduce the concept of source_type for compliance reasons; to keep track of where the balance was coming from. Funds coming from ACH debit payments had to be separated into a separate sub-balance. On any given day that a transfer to your account is scheduled, you may receive either one or two transfers (assuming that the relevant funds source sub-balance is positive).

With recent updates to the way we integrate with Stripe and how ACH payments information is collected (instant authentication and authorization by the user/payer at the time of initiation), the funds are no longer separated out on the Stripe side and all funds now go into the generic 'card balance'. This means that over time you may only see one payout.

Transfer Details

Just like any other ACH-like transaction, a payout from Stripe to your bank account will usually take a few days to arrive. 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 Transfer page).

Failures and Errors

Payout Failures

If your bank can’t receive 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 debit for the negative balance (or the debit was manually 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 payout failure occurs, payouts are on hold and generally do not resume automatically! While payouts are on hold, incoming funds will continue to accumulate.

You will first have to follow the instructions to update your external bank account information or settings. Reach out and let us know that you completed the steps; we will be able to check on the account status and will 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 contained individual transactions (in the standard exports) please reach out to us (see next section).

Pre-filtered Payment History

Click on a particular payout record to see its details, 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.)

If you have specific reconciliation questions and it should become necessary to open a support request, we will ask you to provide a link to this pre-filtered payment history to us.