Laureian

[dusk river]

hi! what kind of connected account are they, Standard/Express/Custom? If it's the latter two, you are creating testmode only accounts so they don't have a live mode so it's not really an issue to change the setting. Or are you talking about changing your platform to manual payouts? If so, then that is a global setting so you can't do it only in test mode
For the second question, I'd recommend using source_transaction https://stripe.com/docs/connect/charges-transfers#transfer-availability , or creating charges using the cards from https://stripe.com/docs/testing#available-balance and immediately making a transfer.