Your Available balance may be negative for the following reasons:
| Financial action | Impact on Available balance**** |
| Chargebacks | You did not have enough in your balance to fund a chargeback, so your Available balance went negative. |
| Fees | You were charged a fee that exceeded your balance, so it went negative. |
| Refunds | You did not have enough balance to fund a refund, so it went negative. |
| Settlements | When we generate your upcoming settlement, your balance may go below the settlement amount. For example, due to a refund, chargeback or fee. After we pay out the settlement amount from your balance, it may go negative. |
| Minimum billing fee | Your processing fees for the month were below your contracted minimum, so Checkout.com charged you the difference. Because the fee is calculated from the previous month's processing, it appears on the following month's invoice. |
| Adjustments | We applied a manual correction to your account, such as a scheme fee that Visa or Mastercard billed us retrospectively. These appear as Adjustment or General Adjustment in the Dashboard. To find out what a specific adjustment covers, request support and provide the adjustment ID. |
Identify the cause
To help identify what caused the negative balance:
- Sign in to the Dashboard.
- Go to Business account > Balances.
- Use the Balance over time graph to identify the date your Available balance went negative.
- Switch to the _Balance activit_y chart.
- Use the date picker to select the same date that your balance went negative.
- Use the Balance activity table to see all financial activity for that day.
- In the table, select the _Funds out _dropdown to view a breakdown of everything deducted from your Available balance that day.
- Check what types of activity (like refunds, chargebacks, or fees) made Funds out higher than Funds in, causing your balance to go negative.
Investigate the transactions
You can investigate the specific transactions that caused your Available balance to go negative using the Financial Actions by Date Range Report.
- Sign in to the Dashboard.
- Go to Reports, and select_ Generate reports._
- From the_ Select type dropdown, select Financial Actions_.
- Use the date picker to select the date your balance went negative, which you determined when identifying the cause.
- Customize any fields as required.
- Select Generate report.
- Open the CSV file and filter by Currency Account ID to see the transactions for sub-account with the negative balance.
Temporary disputed transactions debits
When a cardholder disputes a payment, card schemes require Checkout.com to hold the funds while the dispute is investigated. If this happens, we immediately debit the payment amount and the dispute fee from your Available balance.
A disputed payment may appear as a negative amount in your reports even though you have not lost the funds. In your Financial Actions by Date Range Report, these debits appear in the Breakdown Type field as Chargeback (ADJM).
If you win the dispute, we return the payment amount and any associated fees to your balance. This appears as a positive amount in a later report or settlement.
For more information, see How disputes work.