Payouts API Overview

The Payouts API lets you see a list of deposits and withdrawals from a seller's banking destination.

A banking destination can be a seller's external bank account, a Square checking or savings account (available only in the United States), or a debit card (for instant transfers).

You can use the Payouts API to automatically reconcile transactions to and from the seller's banking destination to ensure that everything adds up. There are two steps in the reconciliation process: comparing the deposit amount from the bank statement to the payout amount and identifying which transactions go into each payout.

To see payouts data that is older than January 2021, see V1 Settlements API.

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Payout object

The Payout object shows the sum of all transactions paid to a seller's banking destination. It is a parent to a set of child payout entries that reflect the balance change for each transaction.

Each Payout object has an ID, which uniquely identifies the Payout object for your application.

The version field is initially set to 0. For each successful update, Square increases the version number. You can use the version field for optimistic concurrency.

{
  "payout": {
    "id": "po_070431e4-e351-11eb-a8bb-02420a140009",
    "status": "SENT",
    "location_id": "{LOCATION_ID}",
    "created_at": "2021-07-12T20:37:51Z",
    "updated_at": "2021-07-12T20:37:51Z",
    "amount_money": {
      "amount": 457,
      "currency_code": "EUR"
    },
    "destination": {
      "type": "BANK_ACCOUNT",
      "id": "bact:cgvL1yv43VFjexample"
    },
    "version": 1,
    "type": "BATCH",
    "arrival_date": "2021-07-13"
  }
}

The following table describes a few of the key fields:

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Payout states

A Payout object can have one of three states: SENT, PAID, or FAILED.

The initial status of a payout is SENT. If Square does not receive any response from the seller's bank for a time period, Square assumes that the payout is successfully deposited and updates the status to PAID.

If the seller's bank account sends a response saying that the payout failed, Square updates the status of the payout entry to FAILED.

If the response from the seller's bank comes back later than Square expects, a payout that is initially marked as PAID can transition to FAILED because the deposit or withdrawal ultimately failed.

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Example use case

Consider a scenario where a seller runs several coffee shops across the country. The coffee shops process thousands of card payments per week.

The seller has set up an automated payout schedule, whereby at the end of each day Square sends a payout to the seller's bank account.

You might use the Payouts API to review the summary of all payouts to make sure it matches with the seller's bank account balance.