Payout approvals add a manual review step between creating a payout and sending it for processing. When the feature is enabled for your merchant account, every payout you create, through the API or the Merchant Portal, enters In Review and waits until an authorised team member approves or rejects it. This page explains how the review flow works, what happens to your balance while a payout waits, who can make the decision, and what is recorded for audit.
Payout approvals are off by default. With the feature disabled, payouts follow the existing flow described in Managing payouts, and no approval email is sent.

​
How payout approvals work

1

A payout is created

Someone on your team creates a payout in the Merchant Portal, or your integration creates one through the Payout API.
2

The payout enters In Review

The payout is not submitted for processing. Its amount moves out of your available balance and into your outgoing balance straight away, so the funds are reserved while the decision is pending.
3

Hello Clever emails your approvers

An approval email goes to your account Admin, with every Finance-role user copied. It carries a Review Payout link to the payout.
4

An approver reviews the payout

The approver opens the payout in the Merchant Portal, checks the details, and either approves or rejects it.
5

The decision is applied

Approval moves the payout to Pending and hands it to the normal processing flow. Rejection moves it to Rejected, and it is never processed.

​
Turning payout approvals on

The feature is controlled per merchant account by Hello Clever, so there is no switch in the Merchant Portal. Contact Hello Clever Support to have payout approvals enabled or disabled for your account.
Enabling payout approvals changes the behaviour of payouts created through the API as well as those created in the portal. Nothing you submit is sent for processing until it has been approved, so make sure someone with approval rights is watching the queue before you switch the feature on.

​
Statuses used by the review flow

Rejected and Failed are different outcomes. Rejected means a person in your team declined the payout before it was ever sent. Failed means the payout was processed and the transfer did not complete. See why payouts fail.

​
What happens to your balance

The review step reserves the funds rather than leaving them spendable, so an approved payout never runs into a balance that has been spent twice. For how the available, incoming, and outgoing figures fit together, see managing balances.

​
The approval email

When a payout enters review, Hello Clever emails your account Admin and copies all Finance-role users. The subject line names the amount and the recipient, so approvers can triage without opening the message. The email includes:
  • Payment breakdown: transaction amount, fees, and the net amount.
  • Recipient details: the fields that apply to the payout method used.
  • Details: Payout ID, Balance ID, External ID, method, created date, and who created it.
  • A Review Payout button that opens the payout in the Merchant Portal.
The Review Payout link requires Merchant Portal authentication. Approving from the email alone is not possible: the link takes you to the payout, and the decision is always made in the portal. Forwarding the email does not pass on the ability to approve.

​
Reviewing a payout

Open the payout from the approval email, or find it in the Payouts table by filtering on the In Review status. The review screen shows the full record so you can check it before deciding:

​
Approving

Select Approve. The payout moves to Pending and is submitted to the normal processing flow once. From that point it behaves like any other payout, including retries and failure handling.

​
Rejecting

Select Reject. You can add a reason, which is optional but is stored with the audit record and is worth filling in when someone else may need to understand the decision later. The payout moves to Rejected and is never sent for processing.
Both decisions are final. A rejected payout cannot be approved afterwards, and an approved payout cannot be pulled back through this screen. To stop an approved payout, use the cancellation options described in managing payouts.

​
Who can approve or reject

The separation between creator and approver is enforced by the portal, so a single user cannot create and release a payout on their own. If your team has only one Admin and no Finance users, that user cannot approve their own portal-created payouts. Invite a second approver before enabling the feature. See inviting users.

​
Audit record

Every payout that goes through review keeps a record of the decision:
  • Who created the payout.
  • The outcome, approved or rejected.
  • Who made the decision.
  • The timestamp of the decision.
  • The rejection reason, where one was given.
This record stays with the payout, so you can evidence the approval chain during a reconciliation or an audit.

​
Payouts created through the API

Payout approvals do not change the API request you send. Your integration creates payouts exactly as before, and the response comes back as usual. What changes is what happens next: the payout is held rather than processed, and nothing moves until an approver acts in the portal. Plan for this in your integration:
  • Expect a delay. The gap between creating a payout and it being processed is now however long the review takes. Do not treat a created payout as sent.
  • Handle rejection. A payout can end in Rejected without ever having been processed. This is a normal outcome, not an error in your request.
  • Keep your external ID. It appears in the approval email and on the review screen, which makes it the quickest way for an approver to tie a payout back to the record in your own system.
See the multi-currency Payout API for the endpoints themselves.