Balance Transaction

A balance transaction is the ledger entry that records every movement into or out of your payment-processor balance. Where a charge or refund describes an event, the balance transaction describes its financial impact — the exact amount that hit your books and when it settled.

What it records

Each balance transaction breaks a movement into its parts:

• `amount` — the gross value of the transaction.
• `fee` — the processing fee deducted.
• `net` — what actually reached your balance (amount − fee).
• `type` — what caused it: charge, refund, payout, adjustment, dispute, and more.
• `available_on` — the date the net funds are scheduled to settle from pending to available.

A $100.00 card payment on standard US pricing produces a balance transaction with amount = $100.00, fee = $3.20, and net = $96.80.

Why it's the source of truth

Because it captures the fee and the net for every event, the balance transaction — not the raw charge amount — is what you use for accurate accounting. Summing the net of all settled balance transactions over a period gives your net volume. Grouping them by the payout they belong to reconciles each bank deposit against the individual payments that funded it.

Settlement and reconciliation

The available_on field ties each balance transaction to settlement: it's the date the money becomes usable, not the date the payment succeeded. Using available_on to build a payout reconciliation report is the standard way to match Stripe deposits to your bank statement line by line.