Announcing Balanced Payouts (YC W11)

What I do on the 1st and 15th of every month:

1) Calculate payout totals for each organization for the prior 2 weeks.

2) Write a check to each organization.

3) Mail the checks.

So when I tell my customers that you're paid on the 1st and 15th of every month, what it really means is that I'll put checks in the mail on those days. Then you have to wait 1-2 days for mail, then 1-2 days for deposits to clear. It gets worse when the 1st or 15th land or national holidays when the mail doesn't run or banks are closed.

These fluctuations in cash flow can kill an organization. Enter Balanced Payouts.

Now it's as simple as running a query that calculates the totals and deposits those amounts to each respective organization. A half day process I did twice a month, now turned into a cron job that runs in < 1 minute.

Thanks Balanced!! (star twinkle on tooth)

I'm very happy to see this. We've still been paying out a lot to our artists by ach by hand and it's miserable. There are apis out there provided by banks but they're god awful and require a lot of hand holding to set up. I'll be using this immediately.

Here's the curl command that allows you to send funds to anyone's US-based bank account in one business day:

    curl https://api.balancedpayments.com/v1/credits \
        -d amount=10000 \
        -d description="Math lesson" \
        -d bank_account[name]="Johann Bernoulli" \
        -d bank_account[account_number]=9900000001 \
        -d bank_account[routing_number]=121000358 \
        -d bank_account[type]=checking \
        -u 7b7a51ccb10c11e19c0a026ba7e239a9:

This was in response to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5026802

At Zaarly, we use next-day ACH to pay out our sellers. It's a total game-changer. Our sellers do business with buyers, and they have the funds in their bank account the following business day. The service level of payouts has enabled such a critical part of our experience. I can't say enough great things about it.

Balanced Payouts looks awesome. We use Stripe to deal with PCI issues, and it means we put some degree of trust in Stripe.

I feel like when dealing with ACH and actual bank accounts, we have to put so much more trust in them because there don't exist the same protections consumers have with credit cards.

Could someone (internal or external) breach Balanced's security, grab all of the bank account numbers and routing numbers, and siphon out everyone's funds? What would be the recourse of users who lost money that way?

I want to love Balanced and is it solves a huge pain point in our start up, but I'm always cautious with our own customers' financial information. I checked Balanced's web site, but couldn't find what kind of security systems they have in place, what kinds of engineers they have on the job, etc.

How does a non-coder use this? I don't know what all that is.

I'm just a Python noob thus far.

Will there be an interface for the rest of us?

So does this work in the UK? I don't see anything in the Help & Support which limits the service to the USA/Canada.

Balanced is fucking killing it.

Any support or plans for making debits via ACH?

What about swift.com payments? That should be able to reach approximately every possible bank account in the world ...