Advance Funding

Instant payout users benefit from quick access to their pending balances. To use these funds safely, explicit actions like advance funding are necessary for accurate bookkeeping when fund availability changes.

How Instant Payouts with advance funding works

Stripe enables Instant Payouts users to access pending balances through the advance and advance_funding type balance transactions. When you create an instant payout that exceeds your available balance, funds are added to your available balance and subtracted from your pending balance to cover the difference.

Granular advance funding

To align advance funding with the original availability of payments, Stripe creates multiple advance_funding type balance transactions when it pulls funds from multiple days’ worth of payments balances.

For example, if you have the following:

When you request a 40 USD instant payout, you’ll see two separate advance_funding type balance transactions:

Reversal of failed or canceled Instant Payouts

When an instant payout fails or gets canceled, the corresponding advance and advance_funding type balance transactions are reversed by offsetting balance transactions. In the example above, if the 40 USD instant payout fails, we:

Negative available balance recovery

When your available balance is negative, advance funding does not restore it. Instead, it only provides funding for the requested instant payout amount, leaving your negative available balance unchanged. We’ll choose the right bucket of pending balances to allow your negative available balance to phase out gradually. This funding is drawn from future days where the cumulative balance is positive. For example:

In this scenario, the cumulative balance on T+1 is -5 USD, while T+2 shows a cumulative balance of 25 USD. If you request a 10 USD instant payout, we:

This method retains more recent pending balances, aiding recovery from a negative balance. The cumulative balance recovers on T+2.

Filter balance transactions by source

Use the source field to find the advance and advance_funding type balance transactions for the Instant Payout. You can access the source field in the Dashboard when you filter transactions or through the Balance Transactions API.