What is the difference between a fixed and a rolling reserve?
Both hold funds back; they differ in how much and for how long.
Your contract can carry both. Where both apply, the amount that must be held
at any moment is the sum of the two:
Initial Rolling Reserve: __% of Net Settlement Amount to be held for __ DaysYour own percentage, number of days and whether those are business or calendar days come from your contract. If you settle in more than one currency, the terms are shown per settlement currency.
Which of my accounts does the reserve come out of?
Your settlement account — the balance that has already completed settlement and is otherwise available to withdraw. Not your pending-settlement balance. This is a deliberate choice, and it has a consequence worth understanding: the reserve is taken after settlement has been calculated, so a reserve hold never changes your settlement amount. Your settlement figures, fees and taxes are exactly what they would be with no reserve; the hold then moves money from your settlement account into your reserve account. What it reduces is your withdrawable amount, not your settled amount.Is the reserve collected on all my transactions?
By default, yes — every transaction on a merchant account with a reserve configured contributes. Collection can also be switched on or off per payment method, so your contract may collect the reserve on some payment methods and not others. Where collection is selective, the base for the rolling percentage is the sum of the settlement amounts of only the contributing payment methods, aggregated per settlement batch and then rounded — so one settlement batch produces one reserve calculation, not one per payment method.How is the holding period counted? Which holidays affect it?
Your contract sets the holding period in one of two ways, and the release date is computed differently for each:
Where your contract counts business days, note that the reserve calendar is not
the one that shifts your settlement dates. Settlement dates defer against the
contract-driven holiday calendar of your related countries (see
Settlement Cycle & Calendar); the reserve
calendar is fixed and does not vary by your transaction countries, your settlement
countries or your payment methods. Two dates derived from the “same” number of
days will therefore not line up, which is the single most common source of
confusion about reserve dates. The settlement calendar’s Reserve Release Date
column shows the computed date so you do not have to reproduce it.
The countdown works per hold, not per merchant:
- Each hold starts with its full contracted period remaining, the day it is created counting as day one.
- The remaining count on each hold is decremented daily.
- The amount that must stay held today is the sum of every hold that is still within its period.
When is my reserve hold created, and when is it released?
A hold is created on your actual settlement date and follows your settlement frequency — a weekly-settling merchant gets a weekly hold, a monthly-settling merchant a monthly one. Each hold carries an expected release date, which is its creation date plus its contracted holding period (counted as described above), and that date is what the settlement calendar shows. Release, however, is not automatic on that date. It is evaluated against what still needs to be held:
The second row is the case that generates tickets. If the reserve was drawn down
and could not be topped back up — typically because the merchant had no new
transactions to top it up from — then releases stop entirely until the balance
recovers. A hold reaching its release date is a necessary condition for release,
not a sufficient one.
What happens when a settlement period nets out negative?
No hold is created that period. There is no negative amount to take a percentage of, and nothing is charged against the reserve to make up the shortfall. The hold is not skipped permanently, though — it is added on the next settlement period with a positive net amount, which then carries both its own hold and the deferred one. See Settlement Calculation Explained for what happens to the negative settlement amount itself.Can Waffo take money out of my reserve automatically?
No. The reserve is not an automatic debit facility. Its purpose is to cover penalties and charges applied by manual action — Waffo staff raising a deduction against a specific, documented case. There is no process that automatically draws on the reserve for routine events. In particular, a negative settlement period does not touch it (see above). Every deduction from the reserve is therefore traceable to a manual voucher, and you see it as a movement in your Reserve Account with a reference number, an amount, the time it was approved and the free-text description entered when the deduction was raised.If the reserve is used, do I have to put it back?
Yes, but not by any action of yours — it is replenished automatically from your settlement account.
The replenishment movement appears in Account History as business type
RESERVE_ADJUSTMENT with the remark Debit from settlement account, so you can
tie a reduction in your settlement balance to a specific reserve top-up.
The interaction with release is worth spelling out, because it is where merchants
lose track: when a hold reaches its release date while the reserve is still short,
the released amount goes to closing the shortfall first. So a release can appear
in your reserve movements without a corresponding increase in your withdrawable
balance.
How much can I withdraw when a reserve applies?
The shortfall is held back — not deducted — and becomes withdrawable again once
the reserve is whole.
Where do I reconcile reserve movements in the Portal?
Reserve movements are kept out of your settlement ledger, in a dedicated Reserve Account area with three views:
Two related changes elsewhere in the Portal:
- The settlement ledger is now labelled Settlement Account, and Account
History no longer mixes reserve holds and releases into it. If you built a
reconciliation against Account History expecting to find reserve holds there,
they are in Reserve per Contract instead. The one reserve-related row that
does remain in Account History is the
RESERVE_ADJUSTMENTtop-up, because that is genuinely a debit from your settlement account. - The Settlement Batch list adds, for merchants with a rolling reserve, the settlement amount that the reserve percentage was calculated on, the reserve order identifier and the reserve amount — so you can verify a hold against the batch that produced it. Merchants without a rolling reserve see the list unchanged.
Does the reserve show up in my settlement files?
No. The Settlement Details and Settlement Summary files carry no reserve column, and a reserve hold never changes any figure in them — the reserve is taken from your settlement account after settlement has been calculated (see above), so the files describe the settlement exactly as it would be with no reserve. Where the reserve does appear:
If you reconcile settlement files against money received, expect the difference
between the file’s
Settlement Amount and your withdrawable increase to be the
reserve hold for that batch — read it off the Settlement Batch row.
My hold does not equal my percentage times my settlement amount. Why?
Four things sit between the two figures, and any of them can account for the gap:
To reconcile a specific hold, work from the Settlement Batch list rather than
from your settlement total: it shows the settlement amount the percentage was
actually applied to, next to the reserve order identifier and the resulting reserve
amount, for exactly that batch.