Ledger Overview

Any card or payments product needs a reliable system of record to track the movement of value between internal and external sources. Having an immutable, double-entry ledger is the right path for any fintech businesses looking to launch and scale their offering and transactional flows. At a high level, that means:

Immutable: Once a transaction is recorded, it cannot be altered, deleted, or reversed - only new entries can be added to correct or adjust previous records. This ensures an auditable history of all financial activity.
Double-Entry: Every transaction is recorded in at least two accounts - a debit in one account and an equal credit in another - ensuring accounting always balances. This creates a self-checking system that maintains accuracy and detects unexpected money movements.

Lithic offers a native ledger that follows both of the above principles, and uses the following building blocks to help you construct your program offering:

Financial Accounts: Balance-tracking object that serves as the container for the transactions tied to an account holder's financial activity
Transactions: Balance-affecting objects that happen to the Financial Account based on actions received from a payment network, customer API, or internal process. At Lithic, we have 5 families of Transactions:
- Card Transactions
- Payment Transactions
- Book Transfer Transactions
- Management Operation Transactions
- External Payments Transactions
Events: Sequence of event objects that happen to transactions. Events can be balance affecting, or non-balance affecting

In using our Financial Accounts and Transactions, you will see this core data populated in various endpoints. Below is an example of an ACH payment transaction:

{ 
  "status": "PENDING",
  //The unique identifier for the transaction
  "token": "3fa85f64-5717-4562-b3fc-2c963f66afa6",
  "created": "2025-12-26T21:42:59.779Z",
  "updated": "2025-12-26T21:42:59.779Z",
  "family": "PAYMENT",
  "category": "ACH",
  "type": "ORIGINATION_CREDIT",
  "currency": "USD",
  "result": "APPROVED",
  // The unique identifier for the balance tracking financial account that is affected by this payment
  "financial_account_token": "3fa85f64-5717-4562-b3fc-2c963f66afa6",
  // The unique indentifier for the financial account outside of Lithic's system that the payment is   going to
  "external_bank_account_token": "3fa85f64-5717-4562-b3fc-2c963f66afa6",
  "direction": "CREDIT",
  "source": "LITHIC",
  "method": "ACH_NEXT_DAY",
  "settled_amount": 500,
  "pending_amount": 200,
  //The corresponding events that happen as part of this Transaction. This list grows as new events happen
  "events": [
      {
        "amount": 10000,
        "type": "ACH_ORIGINATION_INITIATED",
        "result": "APPROVED",
        "detailed_results": ["APPROVED"],
        "created": "2024-04-18T18:16:09Z",
        "token": "34c5b9d2-2d6a-540b-90fe-fa202b418242"
      },
      {
        "amount": 10000,
        "type": "ACH_ORIGINATION_REVIEWED",
        "result": "APPROVED",
        "detailed_results": ["APPROVED"],
        "created": "2024-04-18T18:17:40Z",
        "token": "5f6255f8-4016-5e66-aedf-2e3c76027e04"
      },
      {
        "amount": 10000,
        "type": "ACH_ORIGINATION_PROCESSED",
        "result": "APPROVED",
        "detailed_results": ["APPROVED"],
        "created": "2024-04-18T19:17:40Z",
        "token": "7eec03f2-2fac-4485-bc4b-0526d8bff3ba"
       }
  ],
  "descriptor": "string",
  "user_defined_id": "string",
  "expected_release_date": "2025-12-26",
  "related_account_tokens": {
    "business_account_token": "3fa85f64-5717-4562-b3fc-2c963f66afa6",
    "account_token": "3fa85f64-5717-4562-b3fc-2c963f66afa6"
  },
  //Payment-specific information. In this case it's ACH
  "method_attributes": {
    "sec_code": "CCD",
    "return_reason_code": "string",
    "ach_hold_period": 0,
    "retries": 0,
    "company_id": "string",
    "receipt_routing_number": "string",
    "trace_numbers": [
      "string"
    ],
    "addenda": "string"
  },
}

For customers using Lithic for Financial Accounts and ledgering, we post webhook events to update customers on the latest for any Financial Account changes, new Transactions, or new Events for existing Transactions.