Balance top ups
A balance top up represents an intention to charge a user an amount of money and apply it to their account balance. Balance top ups are automatically scheduled when the system generates customer statements.
By default, a balance top up will be created that clears the user's entire account balance. You can customise this behaviour on a per-user basis.
Manually creating a balance top up
When you need to trigger an earlier or additional payment towards a user's account balance, you can manually trigger a balance top up. To do this:
- Navigate to the user's page.
- In the Billing and Payment section, click Create balance top up.
- You will see the user's account balance at the top of the page. If the amount is negative, the customer owes money; If the amount is positive, the customer's account is in credit.
- Enter the amount you want to charge the user.
- Enter the date you would like to schedule the balance top up for.
- You can schedule a balance top up for up to two weeks in the future.
- The default behaviour is to trigger the balance top up immediately.
- Press Create Balance Top Up to complete the process.
Handling balance top up failures
Balance top ups trigger Bacs Direct Debit payments. Direct Debit payments aren't confirmed immediately; three working days notice is given.
This means that it is possible for a Direct Debit payment to fail after creation. You can configure what the membership system should do after a failure.
The default behaviour is to simply mark the payment as failed and not attempt any retries.
Retries
You can enable retries in Payment settings. When a payment fails, we will schedule a retry for 7-days time. On day 7 when we retry the payment, the three working days notice period will again apply.
We will retry a payment two times (meaning three attempts in total). If the payment still fails on the final attempt, we will mark the balance top up as Failed.
Direct users to the checkout page after exhausting all retries
If you enable the Direct users to the checkout page after all Direct Debit attempts have failed option, the membership software will send the user an email containing a link to a checkout page after exceeding the maximum number of retries (0 or 2 depending on your retry settings) instead of marking the balance top up as failed.
The checkout page will let the user pay the amount owed by card. This lets you prioritise receiving money from a user over manually chasing up and arranging alternative payment.
Retries due to Stripe processing limits
Stripe applies a rolling-window processing limit to the amount accounts can charge by Bacs Direct Debit. If you exceed this limit, payments that would take your Stripe account over the limit will fail. The membership software will reschedule any payment which fails for this reason.
In this case, as the limit is a weekly rolling-window, we will reschedule the payment for 8-days time. We will reschedule and retry payments that fail in this manor on two occasions, after which we will send an email link to the checkout page or mark the balance top up as failed in accordance with your Direct users to the checkout page after all Direct Debit attempts have failed settings.
We will always retry payments that fail due to exceeding Stripe volume limits, regardless of your retry settings.
The weekly rolling-window limit applied to your account increases over time as you process more Direct Debit payments with Stripe. You may only experience this issue if you're new to the platform or are processing a larger than normal payment volume (for example, during membership renewal).
You should contact Stripe support for more information regarding limits.