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Manage liable balance accounts

Understand and manage the different liable accounts in your platform.

Liable balance accounts are balance accounts that belongs to your platform and hold your platform's funds. There are 3 types of liable accounts:

Main liable balance account

This is the main balance account tied to your platform, and holds most of your platform's funds. All your commissions from transactions made on your platform are booked to this account. You can also use this account to pay your users' transaction fees or transfer funds to your users for other reasons, such as to correct balances.

Reserved incorrect splits account

When splitting a payment, you may make mistakes in your API request and accidentally book funds to balance accounts that don't exist or that are unable to receive funds. A balance account is not able to receive funds when:

  • The account has status closed or suspended.
  • The account holder has status closed or suspended.
  • The account holder does not have the required capabilities to receive funds.

In such cases, we book these funds to your reserved incorrect splits account. To correct balances later, you can transfer funds internally from this account to any other balance account on your platform.

Reserved compensation account

A reserved compensation account is a type of liable balance account that is used to compensate for negative balances in your platform.

Balance accounts in your platform can have a negative balance as a result of refunds or chargebacks. Adyen allows negative balances for up to 30 days. If a balance account has a negative balance for more than 30 days, Adyen compensates this by debiting your reserved compensation account.

As a result of this balance transfer, the reserved compensation account can end up with a negative balance. You must then offset this negative balance by topping up this account, or transferring funds internally from another balance account.