Settlement / payout schedule
The gap between 'the charge succeeded' and 'the money is in my bank'. Settlement moves the funds, the payout schedule sets the date.
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What it is
Three different things happen and people call all of them 'getting paid'. Authorization is the issuer promising the money exists. Capture is you claiming it. Settlement is the batch where the networks and the acquiring bank actually move funds into your processor balance. The payout schedule is the separate rule for when your processor pushes that balance to your bank: daily on a rolling delay (T+2 is common), weekly on a fixed weekday, or monthly.
Reach for this the moment you model cash flow or promise a contractor a payment date. New accounts usually sit behind a longer first payout hold (7 to 14 days). Banks do not settle on weekends or holidays. Cross-border sales and currency conversion add a day or more, and a rolling reserve holds back a percentage of volume against future disputes.
Gotcha: a payout is the net of a period, never the sum of that day's sales. Fees, refunds, dispute debits and adjustments all land inside the same transfer, which is exactly why reconciliation is its own job. If refunds exceed sales your balance goes negative and the processor debits your bank account instead of paying you.
Ask AI for it
Build a payouts dashboard for our Stripe account. Fetch payouts and their balance transactions, and for each payout show: expected arrival date, status, gross charges, processing fees, refunds, dispute debits, adjustments and net amount, with a drill-down listing the individual charges inside it. Add a 30-day forward cash-flow projection that applies our payout schedule (rolling 2-day delay, no settlement on weekends or bank holidays) to the pending balance, flag any payout in 'failed' status, and alert us when the account balance goes negative.