Debiting Express and Custom accounts

At times, your platform might need to collect funds from your connected accounts:

• To charge the connected account directly for products or services
• To recover funds for a previous refund
• To make other adjustments to connected account balances (for example, to correct an error)

When using Express or Custom accounts, you can debit a connected account’s Stripe balance to credit to your platform account’s Stripe balance.

Stripe supports two approaches for doing so:

• Charging a connected account for your platform’s products or services
• Transferring from a connected account to recover funds or make other adjustments

Both approaches create the same flow of funds: a Transfer is created on the connected account and a Payment is created on the platform account.

Requirements

This functionality is only supported for Express and Custom. Additionally:

• The connected account and the platform must be in the same region (that is, both must be in Europe or in the US).
• The currency value must match the default currency of the connected account.
• Debiting an account can’t make the connected account balance become negative unless you have reserves enabled (on by default for all new platforms created after January 31, 2017) and have a bank account in the same currency as the debit.
• If a connected account has a negative balance, Stripe might auto debit the external account on file, depending on what country the connected account is in.

Avoid setbacks by verifying the bank for the connected account before using Account Debits.

Charging a connected account

The create a charge API call supports providing a connected account ID as the source value:

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/charges \
  -u "
sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
:" \
  -d amount=1500 \
  -d currency=usd \
  -d source=
{{CONNECTED_ACCOUNT_ID}}

The API call returns the Payment created on the platform account (note: it does not return a Charge).

This approach is appropriate for platforms that charge their connected accounts for goods and services (that is, for using the platform). For example, a platform can charge its connected accounts for additional fees or services through their Stripe balance, minimizing any need to collect an additional payment method and allowing for nearly instant availability of the funds.

Transferring from a connected account

The second method for debiting a connected account is to make a transfer from the connected account to your platform account. Use the Stripe-Account header to authenticate as the connected account and provide your platform’s Stripe account ID as the destination:

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/transfers \
  -u "
sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
:" \
  -H "Stripe-Account: 
{{CONNECTED_ACCOUNT_ID}}
" \
  -d amount=1500 \
  -d currency=usd \
  -d destination={{PLATFORM_STRIPE_ACCOUNT_ID}}

This API call returns the Transfer created on the connected account.

This approach is best for making adjustments within a platform (for example, correcting a payment mistake or recovering any fees you paid to Stripe).

Note that you do need your platform’s Stripe account ID to perform this request. If you don’t know that value already, perform a retrieve account API call using your platform’s API key:

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/accounts/
{{CONNECTED_ACCOUNT_ID}} \
  -u "
sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
:"

This API call returns the Account object that represents your platform account.