Why is my account showing a negative balance?

Your WooPayments balance can become negative in a few ways. The most common by far is the following scenario:

1. You charge a customer for their order on your WooCommerce site.
2. Those funds get added to your WooPayments balance.
3. The money is paid out, reducing your account balance to zero.
4. You refund an order, or a dispute is filed. Now your balance is negative.

That said, the higher your order volume is, the more rare this issue becomes. That’s because new incoming orders will often provide your account balance with enough of a “buffer” to handle incoming refunds and disputes.

For low volume merchants though, negative balances may happen more often, since there are fewer new sales to help offset refunds or disputes.

There are two ways to recover from a negative WooPayments account balance: using the future refunds and disputes (FROD) balance feature of your account, or allowing your usual payout method to be debited.

In brief, the future refunds or disputes (FROD) balance is a special bucket of funds inside your WooPayments account. One of the things it enables you to do is recover quickly from a negative account balance.

Please see our guide to adding funds to your FROD balance for more information.

Note that, by design, any existing FROD balance will be used up in order to prevent your account balance from going negative. As such, if you notice that your account balance is indeed negative, it’s safe to assume that your FROD balance has been zeroed out.

Assuming you do not already use or wish to use the FROD balance feature, your regular payout method may be used to try to recover from a negative balance.

If you use a bank account to receive payouts, it may be debited to cover the negative balance. If your bank account does not qualify to be debited, recovering from a negative balance will behave as described below in the debit card case.

If you use a debit card to receive payouts, your card won’t be debited. Instead, money from future sales on your site will go toward repaying the negative balance. Once your balance becomes positive again, payouts to your card will resume as normal.