Account's Balance

Balance and available balance

When talking about bank accounts, one thing that you always need to know is the difference between your bank account's balance and the available balance, or in different words, the amount of money you can spend/transfer. It should be the same, but the fact is that it isn't.

Why does this happen? Mainly because not everything occurs in real-time. When you use your debit card, sometimes the money you spend leaves your account instantaneously but some other times this happens a few days later. The are a few reasons for this, but the important thing is to note that during this time, from authorization till the moment the money leaves your account, the amount spent remains blocked, and you can't spend it. You already have a commitment for this money.

When you make a payment using Devengo, the same happens. We are fast, we are really fast, but there is always a period of time between the moment you create the payment and the moment in which the banking system process it, where the amount of your payment won't be available.

Let's see it with an example. Say your balance is €1,000 and that you need to make a payment of €100. When you create this payment, the balance of your account will be €1,000 but you will only have €900 available for other payments. There are a few things that can happen from here:

• If you try to create that moment a payment for €901, it will fail because you don't have enough money in your available balance, although your balance still has €1,000.
• Only when the €100 payment has been confirmed your balance will be updated to €900, exactly like your available balance.
• If the €100 payment is rejected, your available balance will get those €100 back and both, your balance and your available balance will be €1,000 again.

You can have many payments whose response you don't know at a given moment, so all of them will reduce your available balance until their response arrives.

Payments life cycle and your balance

Each of your payments will affect your account's balance and your available balance during their lifecycle. When exactly? Let's see what happens in each state:

Some examples

Let's see some examples for a payment of €100 having €1,000 in your balance.

A confirmed payment

A denied payment

A rejected payment

A reversed payment

How to access your balance and your available balance

Our API has a set of endpoints for managing your accounts. Every time you get the details of an account, you will receive as part of the response your balance and your available balance:

{
  "balance": {
    "total": {
      "cents": 100000,
      "currency": "EUR"
    },
    "available": {
      "cents": 90000,
      "currency": "EUR"
    }
  }
}

Remember we always work with cents, so 100000 means €1,000.00.