Split payments between balance accounts

After you have built your payment integration and configured the payment methods for the merchant accounts or stores in your marketplace, your users can start accepting payments from their customers.

To make sure that the pay-in, settlement, and payout processes run smoothly, you must book the incoming funds and fees to the correct balance accounts. This means that payments processed through Adyen must be split between the balance accounts in your marketplace: your liable balance account and your users' balance accounts.

You can split the funds and book them to any number of balance accounts in your marketplace. For example, when a customer pays, you can split the funds into multiple parts:

• The payment for the goods or services, booked to your user's balance account.
• Your marketplace's commission, booked to your marketplace's liable account.
• The transaction fees associated with the payment, booked to your user's balance account.
• The leftover amount after currency conversion, booked to your user's balance account.

You must send the split instructions with every payment or capture request. If you do not provide any split information, the whole payment is booked to your marketplace's liable balance account, including all associated fees.

Split types

When you split a transaction between multiple balance accounts, each split serves a different purpose. For example, a part of the transaction goes to your liable balance account as your marketplace's commission, and a part goes to your user's balance account as the sale amount.

When you send an API request for a transaction, you must define split instructions for each split of the full transaction amount. In each set of split instructions, you must use the type field to define the purpose of that split.

Certain split types also require you to define other values in the split instructions. For example, when you want to book the split amount to your user's balance account (type is BalanceAccount), you must specify the ID of that balance account using the account parameter.

The following table shows the possible split type values you can send in your request, and whether you must send another parameter (account, amount, or reference) in the split instruction.