Why Your Ream Balance May Be Negative

This is for Authors in our Direct integration (see below for what Managed/Express authors see).

We know it is alarming to open your Ream Dashboard and see a negative balance on your account.

How is this even possible? One of my readers just signed up as a paid subscriber, I thought I was making money?

We understand your frustration and want to share with you that, first, everything is okay!

The reason you may see a negative balance on your account is due to a quirk with how Stripe charges their payment processing fees to customers. This quirk is something that only Direct authors will experience and is not visible for Ream Managed Authors.

This is because Direct authors own their Stripe accounts, have full control over payouts, and are paid directly by their readers and also charged directly for Stripe fees.

Part of Stripe’s payment processing fees is a subscription billing fee that helps you accept recurring payments from readers. This fee is 0.5% per transaction.

This small fee is applied after the transaction is complete, whereas all other fees are charged at the moment of the transaction. 

If your available balance has already been paid out, this can sometimes lead to a negative balance when this subscription billing fee is applied to your Stripe account. 

This balance will become positive when you are paid next by your readers and is normal Stripe functioning.

Note: When authors sign-up for Ream through our Direct integration, all payouts are set to automatic, meaning the instance your Stripe balance becomes available it is paid out to your bank account. If you are a Direct author and would like to adjust your payout schedule to daily, weekly, or monthly, you can follow those instructions here. 

For Managed/Express Authors:

A legacy balance reconciliation row represents the difference between an author’s balance under Ream’s previous balance calculation and the balance produced by the new transaction ledger by Stripe. This visible adjustment by Stripe is an accounting reconciliation which prevents historical activity from being lost or counted twice. Normally most accounting adjustments are not visible and are internal only.

A positive adjustment means the new ledger was initially understating the author’s available balance. A negative adjustment means it was overstating it. Basically the payment processer was estimating things like exchange rate and banking fees at the time of the transaction.

The row changes the Ream ledger balance but does not initiate a new Stripe transaction, such as a debit or credit of your account.

In a nutshell, this was an accounting adjustment by Stripe as they change accounting methods and reconcile payments, and will not affect your balance or payouts in any way.

A positive adjustment means the new ledger was initially understating the author’s available balance. A negative adjustment means it was overstating it. The row changes the Ream ledger balance but does not initiate a new Stripe transaction.

In a nutshell, this was an accounting adjustment by Stripe as they changed accounting methods and will not affect your balance or payouts in any way.

If you have any questions, please contact our Support Team at support@reamstories.com.