#Nameless - SC&T application fee
cosmic sluice
Unfortunately not. The application fee in the SC&T flow is whatever you keep when you send the money away.
Is the underlying question how to resolve the application fee refunding scenario?
sharp cave
Does that show in the application fee section of the Stripe dashboard?
and reports from a platform account in connect
Our current use case for Stripe Connect essentially involves us; the platform, our merchant, and our merchant's franchisor
We'd like to take a payment for some food order, take a small application fee, a small franchise fee to the franchisor, and the rest to the merchant
Essentially a split like:
Platform: 1%
Franchisor: 1%
Merchant: 98%
Then when there is a refund, the platform should keep the application fee (because it pays for network charges, ic2, taxes, 3ds fees, all that stuff) but the other two should be refunded, ending as follows:
Platform: 1%
Franchisor: 0%
Merchant: -1%
We initially used Destination Charge flow, but the problem arose in which we supplied a second transfer to the franchisor - this makes the application fee ALWAYS refunded to the customer, and NEVER transferred from the merchant connect account to the platform account (and thus the platform loses the money spend on fees)
cosmic sluice
And to be clear, both the merchant and the franchisor are separate connect accounts that are connected to your platform?
Because when splitting the payment out to two or more merchants we typically recommend using the SC&T flow. With that the typical path would be to reverse your transfer to them and then do a partial transfer for that amount to your customer. https://stripe.com/docs/connect/charges-transfers#issuing-refunds
It sounds like you are trying to take more money than you transferred to them which unfortunately is not possible as an automatic part of the refunds process. To do that, you would need to do something like debit their account, keep a chargeable card of theirs on file, or withold some of your future transfers to them until you have the funds that you think you should from them. https://stripe.com/docs/connect/account-debits
sharp cave
Yes - Merchant is one Connect account, Franchisor is another
I recently implemented SC&T - but this does not show the application fee in the dashboard unless I'm doing something wrong
For example:
If we have a $10.00 order, and send $8 to Merchant and $1 to Franchisor, we keep $1 - should this $1 show as "application fee" ?
cosmic sluice
Unfortunately not, SC&T does not have a concept of an application fee.
sharp cave
unfortunately our service requires the fee to show as a fee as our merchants use that in their reporting systems, so if it doesn't show as a fee, the fee column in itemized and summary reports would be empty
cosmic sluice
Are those systems something that automatically connects to Stripe or are you reporting the data to those systems?
sharp cave
we use report runs, and essentially "proxy" stripe's file and reporting apis for security, and thus we don't actually touch the reports otherwise we'd probably just rename the columns after replacing with data from metadata
I think the solution I have to work to currently then would be a Destination Charge flow, that on refund webhooks prorates the application fee refund (as a transfer from merchant -> platform) based on the amount actually being refunded - while also prorating the franchise fee transfer reversal
cosmic sluice
Unfortunately there isn't really a way to have two application fees here and I don't know if there is a good way to process the refunds like that automatically.
What do you mean by prorating here? Are you talking about a partial refund based on those fees?
sharp cave
For the situation in which a $10.00 order is refunded partially ($5 refund), the platform is debited $5.
In destination charge flow with an additional transfer (using amount to transfer an amount to the merchant), we can keep an application fee of $1 on the original order, with $1 being transferred to the Franchisor,
When it comes to the refund, $5 is debited from the platform, which is 50% of the total order value, and therefore 50% of the franchisor account transfer should be reversed, as should 50% of the merchant transfer (which is handled by transfer_data.destination automatically). We then need to take application_fee_amount x 50% and send that from merchant connect account to platform account to balance out the loss of the application fee portion of this refund as our platform should always keep the application fee
cosmic sluice
So you take a $10, the merchant gets $8 while the platform and franchisor each get $1. And when you refund $5, you want all of that to come from either the merchant or franchisor in some proportional amount?