rachel-connect

[limber venture]

for Standard accounts you can only reverse a transfer if the money involved in the original transfer hasn't settled yet, or if the account has a positive available balance(check the API, not the dashboard) https://stripe.com/docs/api/balance/balance_object#balance_object-available ;
a platform is not able to make a Standard account gain a negative balance by pulling back transfers

you also should not use Destination Charges with Standard(which it sounds like you are?) for reasons like this

as for what can be done about it, you'd need to contact our support team! But as far as I know the best option is to not use Destination charges + Standard. There are ways to avoid it, like putting the account on manual payouts so they accumulate a balance in case you need to issue refunds/reverse transfers later, and also for Express/Custom , in this scenario you'd instead just get a negative balance + reserve(https://stripe.com/docs/connect/account-balances#accounting-for-negative-balances), but none of that applies to Standard accounts.

[normal lintel]

Thank you for that useful information. We are moving to implement direct charges but need a workaround in the meantime. I think I can do that based on what you have told me. Cheers

[limber venture]

yeah this is a somewhat common question, you can't reverse the transfer if it's too long after the payment happened and the account is on automatic payouts(since at this point the money is already paid out and you are not allowed to make their balance go into the negative on Standard accounts)

a workaround would be maybe take a larger application fee/smaller transfer amounts on future payments with that account to claw the funds back over time.

[normal lintel]

Thanks. I don't think that viable as we are transferring the whole amount to the connected account. The sooner we move to direct charges the better, I guess. I can always refund from our platform account and reconcile manually (I guess)

[limber venture]

yes you can just call the API to refund, not pass reverse_transfer and it should work, but if your platform is one that always transfers the full amount you probably don't have any funds so the refund would be pending (https://support.stripe.com/questions/pending-refunds-due-to-insufficient-funds-or-stripe-balance)

so overall you really want to talk to our support team or any Stripe contacts you have, about the risks involved in the setup you have right now

[normal lintel]

Yeah, understood and we are changing to direct charges. Thanks for all the info 🙂