Unneeded withdrawal and charge?

[indirect]

Sooo... gittip 56 included both an automatic withdrawal (for more than my balance) and an automatic charge (to get me back in the black). But at the end of it, I paid $0.84 in fees for no apparent reason. Any idea why that happened?

[chadwhitacre]

Sorry. :-(

Looking at your history page, it looks like you upped your giving from 55 to 56. We hold money in your account from week to week to cover your tips, but since you upped your giving we needed to pull more money in in order to cover your now-higher tips. We charge a minimum of $10 to minimize fees (in most cases). Since you also receive some money yourself that put you back up over the $10 balance to pay out. We left enough in there to cover your now-higher tips next week, so this fee-laden dance should happen again next week.

BTW, you should read the history transactions from top to bottom within a given week. So in week 56 the charge happened before the withdrawal.

tl;dr The $0.84 is basically a one-time fee to reset equilibrium due to changing tip amounts.

[chadwhitacre]

Does that explain it sufficiently? Do you see something we can tweak here to avoid this fee in the future?

[indirect]

Oh how strange — when I checked on my history (which I guess was while 56 was in the middle of running?), I saw a combination of the transactions that are now listed under 55 and 56, but all listed under 55. That made it a bit more confusing. :)

The change to reach equilibrium makes sense to me. The only way I can think of to avoid the charge and withdrawal would be to delay the charging until after my tips (both in and out) have been calculated, instead of running the charge in the middle of them. I imagine that's complicated, though.

Thanks for explaining!

[chadwhitacre]

Yeah, it's complicated because until we actually charge people's cards we don't know how much we have to work with each week, so the charging step has to come before the reshuffling step.

I've added a +1 for you to #148 for the history wonkiness during payday.

[indirect]

If charging has to come before shuffling, I think I'm confused again — my history for 56 shows a tip coming in right away, raising my balance to $1.50, before I'm charged and then tip other people. Is it "charge, then tip" on a per-user basis?

[chadwhitacre]

Yes, right, sorry. We do three loops during payday:

• Loop to charge-and-distribute.
• Loop to distribute from teams to members (only one team so far, still experimenting with this feature).
• Loop to pay out to bank accounts.