Santa needs reliable deliveries. So do you. We got you.

With the holidays right around the corner, we've been thinking a lot about deliveries. Santa needs to make sure every one of his gifts gets to its intended recipient on time - and so does your accounts payable team. Unfortunately, the nature of the banking industry means no system is foolproof; transfer errors do happen. Normally, this results in reaching out to our Support elves to find out what happened and to try and resolve the issue.

Our team has been hard at work trying to sleigh that problem for you, though!

Now, if a Payable fails - that is, goes into a state of failed - you'll find a new failure_detail field when you query it from the Retrieve a Payable endpoint. The detail object will have a human-readable error, which is great - but you'll also get a type slug that allows you to take some automated actions to resolve most common failures. For example:

• If the type of failure is funding_failure, the Payable's withdraw_from_account had insufficient funds. You might need to make a transfer to the account, or perhaps make a Deposit Funds into Routable Balance call if the Routable balance was the withdraw_from_account.
• If the type is invalid_company_name, the Company in pay_to_company's legal name doesn't match what we have on record; you might need to fire off an email to your vendor asking them to update it.
• If you see invalid_bank_account_currency, you tried to pay the vendor in a currency that's incompatible with their bank account. You might want to update the currency_code in your Payable, or perhaps Re-Invite a Company to ask for new bank information. You'll also want to do a re-invite if you see invalid_bank_account_inactive, which means the account has been closed or is otherwise unable to accept funds.
• If you see compliance_failure, the vendor Company was flagged as part of our Compliance Checks, and you will likely need to evaluate the vendor to decide whether to dismiss a Compliance Check to allow payments to proceed.

All of these actions can be taken programmatically, covering the majority of potential failures. The rest will fall into an unknown status, or into rejected_refused which just means the vendor (or their bank) rejected the payment outright. With these actions being automated, your vendors get paid faster, and your accounting team has more time to deck the halls!

We hope you and yours have a safe, happy and fulfilling holiday season! We may have more announcements before the end of the year yet, but if not, we'll see you in 2026!