The funds from the payments that you process for your users are held in their balance accounts until you pay them out on their verified bank account (transfer instrument). A reliable payout process ensures that you can support your users' cash flows.
How it works
When a shopper completes a purchase with one of your platform's users, the shopper's funds are first settled to your user's balance account. This means that Adyen received the funds and credited these to your user’s account. Your settlement schedule is the combination of the day on which the transaction takes place and the settlement delay.
From the balance account, the funds can be paid out to an external bank account that is connected to the balance account by your user. This external account must be verified during onboarding.
After you configure your transfer schedule, and optionally, set a sales day closing time, Adyen initiates transfer instructions according to your configurations. Alternatively, you can initiate on-demand payouts to payout when needed. After a scheduled or on-demand payout is triggered, Adyen sends Payout webhooks to inform you of payout-related events. We also share an estimated arrival time that indicates the arrival time of the funds to your user's external bank account.
Payout time and amount
Providing a reliable payout experience is critical to support your platform's users. You must set clear expectations about payout times.
For scheduled payouts, the payout times are automated by configuring sweeps that push out or pull in funds from a balance account based on a pre-defined schedule, amount, and source or destination. On-demand payouts let you initiate payouts off-schedule.
For scheduled payouts, the payout amount depends on Adyen's calculation of the available payout amount. For on-demand payouts, you specify the amount when you make a transfer request.
The payout times and amount can be influenced by:
- Your sales day configuration. Sales day is a 24-hour period in which Adyen processes your payments. By default, Adyen defines a sales day from midnight (00:00) to midnight of the next day (23:59) in the balance account's local timezone. You can configure your sales day until 7:00 AM if your user's business closes after midnight.
- Your settlement delay configuration.
- By default, funds are settled with Sales day payout with a payout delay of two days. It is possible decrease your payout delay at a premium depending on your situation and region.
- The value date indicates when the balance becomes available.
For payment methods that do not support Sales day payout, funds are settled after Adyen receives them from the payment partner. For payment methods that the payment partner does not settle to Adyen, such as Mealvouchers, a value date is not shown and your users must arrange payouts with the payment partner.
- The transfer priority you set in your transfer request.
Recommendations
- Opt for a daily payout frequency to meet cashflow needs of your users.
- When configuring scheduled payouts, make sure the scheduled payout time is after the funds are credited to your user's balance account, and before the cut-off time. Cut off times vary by location, currency, and transfer priority.
- For on-demand payouts, trigger payouts before cut-off times.
- Use Adyen’s scheduled payouts with Regular transfer priority.
- For the UK, set the transfer priority to Fast.
- For the US:
- Central Eastern Time([C]ET): set the transfer priority to Regular.
- Pacific Time (PT): set the transfer priority to Fast.
- Set payout times in line with your users' business days as closely as possible, to ensure that funds can be paid out as fast as possible when they become available.
- Communicate cut-off and estimated payout times to your users.
Payout reconciliation
Make sure your reconciliation aligns with the expectations of your users. This means providing reporting and reconciliation functionality that let users link their transactions to the payouts they receive and the fees they incur.
Recommendations
Use our user interface components that offer a dashboard view of completed payouts for each user's balance account to help users reconcile their payouts.
Transfer statement descriptions
A transfer statement description is the text that your users see on their bank statements when they receive payouts, which helps them identify the transaction. Adyen passes the description that you provide to the recipient bank.
To allow your users to easily identify your payouts, we recommend that your transfer statement description includes:
- The name of your platform
- Your user's business
- The payout date
With scheduled payouts, you can set placeholders to generate dynamic transfer descriptions.
Missed payouts
Rarely, a missed payout can occur. It is important to identify the cause for the missed payout and to resolve it for your users.
- If payouts are missed for a single user, this may be caused by missing or unverified details in the Know Your Customer (KYC) process. In your Customer Area, you can manage the account holders to support user onboarding.
- If payouts are missed for multiple users, this may be related to an incident at Adyen or the user’s recipient bank. To monitor incidents, check Adyen’s status page.
If you cannot resolve the issue, or cannot identify the reason for a missed payout, submit a support ticket.