The Rolling Reserve
Some payment methods are reversible and guests can request a chargeback without you having a strong position to defend it. This mainly applies to card payments made via a credit card stored on file (MoTo) but also to a lot of credit or debit card payments transacted on your website (eCommerce). You can, however, reduce the risk of a chargeback by routing your bookers through the 3d-secure flow. The risk of a chargeback is even higher for payments where the service has not yet been provided. Such prepayments are treated as liabilities towards your guests and cannot be seen as working capital.
When such a reversible payment is subject to a chargeback claim, the payment network will refund the amount to the card holder and will recover the money from Adyen. Adyen funds this from the payments not yet paid out to you, but in cases where there are insufficient funds in process, apaleo will be liable for those amounts. The same applies to refunds you initiate on past transactions that cannot be covered by funds in process.
There are two situations where apaleo will not be able to easily recover the amounts from your end:
- You ended the business relationship with apaleo.
- Your business ceased to exist.
To protect our business from such losses, we hold back a rolling reserve that covers for such potential liabilities of a merchant (MPL). Read the “Understand MPL for Merchants” document for further details on how the MPL is calculated. You can find it attached to this guide (below).
The Refund Reserve
The Refund Reserve is used to cover for reimbursements, that cannot be covered by recently received payments. It will be used if the amount of the refunds exceeds incoming payments at a given moment.
A refund cannot be processed if there are no sufficient funds from payments and if in addition there are no funds in the Refund Reserve.
Hence the Refund Reserve exists to ensure that you can process refunds without having to depend on incoming payments for future reservations.
To transfer funds into your account, you need to make a bank transfer. For each bank transfer, you need to generate a payment reference and other required details. This is the fastest way of transferring funds to your account.
Note that any amount above the Reserve threshold will be transferred back to you at the next moment of payout. When transferring funds to your Reserve, you might therefore need to adjust the Reserve threshold.
To transfer funds into your account:
- Go to Finance > Balances overview.
- Select Control your balances in the upper-right corner.
- Under Reserve balance, select Top up.
- Enter the amount that you want to add to the Reserve.
- Select Generate payment details.
This opens a new window with the required payment details for your bank transfer. - Make a bank transfer using the required details.
Make sure that you copy the Reference (message) for each individual bank transfer. - Select Done.
For payments made in EUR or USD, the funds are added to your Reserve on the same day. For most other currencies, the funds are added to your Reserve on the next day.