Overview
When you no longer need to send payouts to a payee, you can delete them from your account. This article explains how deletion works and what happens to any existing payouts.
How Deletion Works
Deleting a payee removes them from your active payee list. This is a permanent action and cannot be undone.
When you delete a payee:
In-progress payouts to that payee will still complete normally. Deletion does not cancel or interrupt payouts that have already been submitted.
New payouts to the deleted payee will fail. You will not be able to create payouts referencing a deleted payee ID.
Historical data is preserved. Completed payout records that reference the deleted payee remain in your transaction history for audit and reconciliation purposes.
Deleting via the Merchant Portal
Navigate to Payees, find the payee you want to remove, and open their profile. Click Delete Payee and confirm the action. The payee is removed from your active list immediately.
Deleting via the API
Send a DELETE request to /v1/payees/{payee_id}:
curl https://api.antonpayments.dev/v1/payees/pye_abc123 \ -X DELETE \ -H "Authorization: Bearer ak_test_..."
A successful deletion returns a 200 response confirming the payee has been removed.
Before You Delete
Before deleting a payee, consider the following:
Check for pending payouts. While in-progress payouts will complete, it is good practice to ensure all payouts have reached a terminal state before deleting the payee.
Export records if needed. If you need the payee's details for your records, export or save them before deletion since you will not be able to retrieve the full payee record after removal.
Consider deactivation instead. If you might need to pay this recipient again in the future, consider keeping the payee and simply not creating new payouts rather than deleting them permanently.
Impact on Instruments
When a payee is deleted, all associated payment instruments (bank accounts, wallets, cards) are also removed. The tokenized payment data is handled according to data retention policies.
Audit Trail
Payee deletions are recorded in the audit trail. The deletion event captures who performed the action and when, maintaining a complete compliance record. Historical payout data referencing the deleted payee remains intact and accessible for reporting.
Reconciliation
After deleting a payee, any completed payouts to that payee remain in your transaction history. You can still filter and search for these payouts by payee ID in your transaction reports, even though the payee record itself is no longer active.