All Lithic Financial Accounts have three types of balances:

• available: funds that you can spend or transfer
• pending: funds that are set aside for authorized card transactions or ACH transactions that have not yet been released. Funds from the pending balance cannot be accessed for spend or other use cases
• total: the sum of available and pending balances

Balances can be either positive or negative. Positive balance indicates that the financial account has been pre-funded while a negative balance indicates that your financial account requires funding. Lithic currently only accepts settlement and funding in USD, so you would only see balances in USD currency.

Funds will move between available and pending balances as a financial transaction goes through its lifecycle. For example:

• A card authorization for $10 would move $10 from the available balance to the pending balance. When that transaction settles, $10 would be deducted from the pending balance
• An ACH payment for $100 would first appear in your pending balance. After a period of time per our ACH schedule, the $100 would be released from your pending balance and moved to your available balance for you to spend or transfer

During the card authorization flow, your available balance is checked against your “minimum balance” requirement to ensure there are enough funds to fulfill the transaction. Depending on your program's configuration, the check will be done on either the available balance of your program’s ISSUING financial account or an end-user account’s ISSUING financial account. Note that the available balance checked in the authorization flow is the same balance that will be provided to the network during a balance inquiry.

To learn more about how minimum balances can impact authorizations, check out Quick Start - Accounts & Money Movement.

Get the balances for a program or end-user

Get the balances for a program or a given end-user account. This endpoint can only be used for financial accounts that are managed by the program associated with the calling API key. If an account_token is provided in the query parameter, the balances for that end-user’s financial accounts will be returned; otherwise, the endpoint will default return the balances for the program’s financial accounts.

The current balance is returned by default, unless a query date is provided in which case the historical balance at that time is returned.

Get balances for a financial account

Get the balance for a given financial account. The current balance is returned by default, unless a query date is provided in which case the historical balance at that time is returned.

Users can also retrieve the balance after a given transaction event by providing a last_transaction_event_token. A balance will be returned only if this transaction event has been approved and has a balance impact. A declined event does not trigger any update to the balance, so no balance is returned.

Get aggregate balances by financial account type

Use this to fetch the aggregated balances for all end-user accounts by a financial account type.

Events API and Webhooks

You can receive notification of External Bank Account events by subscribing to the following event types in the Events API:

• balance.updated: Notification that the balance for an ISSUING, OPERATING, or RESERVE financial account has been updated