#jakel - Currency Issues
red kite
Hello! Do you have both an EUR and GBP bank account set up for Payouts on your account?
sudden cape
The platform just has a EUR bank account. But we are looking to payout to a UK connect account that has a GBP bank account
Perhaps I should add an additional GBP bank account in test mode?
red kite
In most situations a given Stripe account will only accrue a balance in a given currency if the account has a bank account with a matching currency. Otherwise the currency is converted.
Can you tell me more about your desired funds flow, all of the accounts involved, and the bank accounts and currencies on each account?
sudden cape
thank you.
We are a FR Platform - EUR bank account
We are using separate charges & transfers to move funds to 2 UK connected accounts, each with GBP bank accounts.
Example (without Stripe fees):
- GBP 100.00 charge is made
- We transfer GBP 20.00 to UK connect account A
- We transfer GBP 80.00 to UK connect account B
red kite
Are. you using on_behalf_of?
red kite
Okay, so the currency should be determined by the connected accounts for these transfers. See here: https://stripe.com/docs/connect/currencies
But you're not seeing that behavior?
sudden cape
The transfers in the above example are working properly. Where we are running into trouble is on the following use case where we want to "transfer" funds from UK Connect account A to UK connect account B
We essentially will want to use our GBP balance to pay UK connect account B and then use the account debit API to place a charge on UK connect account A to cover the funds
We just cannot test it because our current available balance in GBP is 0.00
In addition, we get the following error when attempting to debit the UK connect account:
sudden cape
that is the balance of our platform
but i thought we should should be able to use the account debit API to place a charge on a connected account regardless of the connected account's balance since "Allow negative debits" is enabled by default
red kite
Your platform account is the one ending in 3QTa, right?
sudden cape
no
our platform ID is: acct_1K7hlZIstzvjLgBa
the account one ending in 3QTa is the UK Connect account we are attempting to debit
red kite
Okay, so what's the balance from the API look like on that account?
sudden cape
how am i am able to retrieve the balance for a specific connected account via the API?
red kite
You make the API call on the connected account: https://stripe.com/docs/connect/authentication
sudden cape
curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/balance
-u {{PLATFORM_SECRET_KEY}}:
-H "Stripe-Account: {{CONNECTED_STRIPE_ACCOUNT_ID}}" \
like this?
red kite
Yep!
sudden cape
and i want to use the full accountID (acct_1KLzCwRRx7fp3QTa) ? doesn't seem to be picking this up
red kite
Yep, the full account ID. When you say it's not picking that up what do you mean? Do you have a request ID I can take a look at? Here's how you can find a request ID: https://support.stripe.com/questions/finding-the-id-for-an-api-request
red kite
That's showing the available balance is zero, which makes sense given the error you're seeing.
sudden cape
Right, but shouldn't i be able to debit the connected account even if the balance is 0?
red kite
No, I don't think so.
sudden cape
red kite
That's not what that property means: https://stripe.com/docs/api/accounts/object#account_object-settings-payouts-debit_negative_balances
That indicates that if the balance goes negative we'll try to recover the funds from the account's bank account.
It doesn't mean you as the platform can make the balance negative.
sudden cape
oh, i thought it meant that we would be able to withdraw funds from the connected account? We currently do this for our US connected accounts through our US platform
red kite
You can debit funds from the connected account as long as they have an available balance.
To clarify, debit_negative_balances indicates Stripe will attempt to recover funds from the account's linked bank account if the Stripe account balance goes negative. It has nothing to do with you debiting the account from the platform.
You can debit the connected account if there's an available balance, but this particular connected account has an available balance of zero, so you can't debit it.
If you add funds to the available balance on the connected account you can then debit those funds.
You can add funds by creating payments directly on the connected account using the 0077 test card and the Stripe-Account header technique you used to retrieve the balance.
sudden cape
got it
but for the US connect account, it has a balance of $0.00 and we were still able to place a debit on the account
as shown above, the first "payout" was a $75.00 withdrawl
red kite
There might be different rules for different countries, or a unique configuration on your account, I'm honestly not sure. For questions about funds flows like that support can help you better than we can here (we're focused on code and developer issues): https://support.stripe.com/contact
sudden cape
got it, thanks for all of your help