What does payment status "pending" mean?

[BenSturmfels]

I've put through some test payments through via a Stripe test API key. When I click on a payment in Houdini, I notice that it's listed as "pending". What does "pending" signify here? Is there a background job or similar that talks to Stripe to determine when these payments are settled?

[wwahammy]

Ruby Charge objects can be in a number of different states in Houdini:

• failed: a charge was attempted but didn't succeed
• pending: Stripe may not have to wait for the charge to settle before finalizing the charge. The money usually isn't in the Stripe account at that point
• available: The money is available on Stripe
• disbursed: The money is paid out to the nonprofit's bank account (only really useful if using Stripe Connect)

You should run bin/rails heroku_scheduled_job[update_np_balances] daily to update that state.

Longer term, we will just handle the webhook from Stripe so there's no need for the job.

There is a background job but it's not documented!

• bin/rails heroku_scheduled_job[update_np_balances] will check if the items are still pending. Running it about once a day is ideal.

Ideally, we should handle the webhook from Stripe to simply move charges from pending to available

[BenSturmfels]

Thanks very much @wwahammy. Diving into this, I see that the mark_available_charges expects a stripe_account_id. Can stripe_account_id be set via the dashboard in Houdini 2? It appears that a self-hosted non-profit would need to specify STRIPE_API_KEY, STRIPE_API_PUBLIC environment variables and stripe_account_id in the database. Is that right?

[BenSturmfels]

Also, would it make sense to extend crontab.sh to also run update_np_balances as well as the other tasks defined in scheduled_jobs.rb?

[wwahammy]

Thanks very much @wwahammy. Diving into this, I see that the mark_available_charges expects a stripe_account_id. Can stripe_account_id be set via the dashboard in Houdini 2? It appears that a self-hosted non-profit would need to specify STRIPE_API_KEY, STRIPE_API_PUBLIC environment variables and stripe_account_id in the database. Is that right?

That does seem to be how it's set up. In cases where there's only a single nonprofit on the instance, that is a pretty awkward setup. I would recommend filing a bug about not having a good way to set the stripe_account_id when nonprofits are created via the command line (which is how they're created in Houdini as of now)

[wwahammy]

Also, would it make sense to extend crontab.sh to also run update_np_balances as well as the other tasks defined in scheduled_jobs.rb?

Yes, good idea!