Overview
Your Anton Payments account holds balances in multiple currencies. Understanding how these balances work is essential for managing your payouts effectively and ensuring you always have sufficient funds available.
Balance Components
Each currency in your account has three balance components:
Available -- Funds you can use for new payouts right now. This is the amount you can draw from when creating payouts or confirming batches.
Held -- Funds reserved for payouts that are currently in progress. These funds have been committed to payouts that have been created but have not yet completed.
Total -- The sum of available and held. This represents your complete balance in a given currency.
How Holds Work
When you create a payout, Anton immediately moves the payout amount from your available balance to your held balance. This ensures the funds are reserved and cannot be double-spent on another payout.
The hold lifecycle works as follows:
Payout created: The payout amount moves from
availabletoheld.Payout completed: The held amount is released and deducted from your total balance (the funds have left your account).
Payout cancelled: The held amount is returned to your available balance. No funds leave your account.
Payout failed: Similar to cancellation -- the held amount returns to available.
Checking Your Balances
All currencies:
curl https://api.antonpayments.dev/v1/balances \ -H "Authorization: Bearer ak_test_..."
This returns an array of balance objects, one per currency that you hold.
Single currency:
curl https://api.antonpayments.dev/v1/balances/USD \ -H "Authorization: Bearer ak_test_..."
In the merchant portal, your balances are displayed on the Dashboard with a breakdown by currency.
Insufficient Balance
If you attempt to create a payout or confirm a batch without sufficient available balance, the API returns a 400 error with the code insufficient_balance. The error message tells you the available amount and the required amount so you can determine how much additional funding is needed.
Multi-Currency Balances
Anton maintains separate balances for each currency. If you have USD but need to send GBP, you can use Anton's foreign exchange feature to convert between currencies. Request an FX quote to see the exchange rate before executing the conversion.
Tips
Check your available balance before confirming large batches to avoid confirmation failures.
Monitor your held balance to understand how much is committed to in-progress payouts.
In sandbox mode, your accounts are pre-funded with test balances in multiple currencies for testing.