This article explains what your ShipEngine Balance is, how to add funds, enable auto-funding, and view the transaction history of your balance.
Your ShipEngine Balance pays for ShipEngine Carrier labels, additional fees, post-shipment carrier adjustments, and shipment insurance for those carriers that are automatically included with your ShipEngine account.
You can programmatically connect via API your own additional, separate carriers and see your negotiated rates inside ShipEngine, and to connect your own carriers through the ShipEngine dashboard, see our Connect Your Carriers article.
To purchase labels for a ShipEngine Carrier, you must have funds in your ShipEngine Balance. You can add funds when you purchase the label, add them manually in your Subscription Plan > Payment Method settings, or set ShipEngine to enable auto-funding. This feature will automatically add funds once the balance falls below a specified threshold.
Set Up Billing Information and Carriers First
To add funds to your ShipEngine Balance, you must have already set up a payment method with your billing information as well as activated ShipEngine Carriers.
To learn how you can programmatically add funds via an API call, please see the Add Funds to your ShipEngine Balance page.
After activating ShipEngine Carriers, you must add funds to create labels. All labels created using ShipEngine Carriers are prepaid, using the funds added to your ShipEngine Balance.
To add funds to your ShipEngine Balance:
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Log in to ShipEngine.
We recommend auto-funding to ensure your postage balance never falls below a set threshold amount. This will help you avoid interruptions to your workflow when creating labels.
To set ShipEngine to auto-fund your balance:
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Go to the Auto-Funding tab and toggle auto-funding On. Set the minimum balance before more postage is automatically purchased.
For example, if you wanted to purchase $250 any time your account balance is below $25, set the When balance falls below amount to ‘25’ and set the Add the following amount to ‘250’. Then enter the maximum number of times ShipEngine can automatically purchase postage in a day.
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Click Save.
Transaction History is where you can view an itemized list of transactions that affect your ShipEngine Balance.
The Transaction History grid lists transactions chronologically by date starting with the most recent. It includes the following transaction types:
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Label purchases
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Insurance purchases
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Service charges/adjustments
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Debits and credits to the ShipEngine balance
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Refunds
To review your transactions:
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Scroll past the Balance and Payment Method sections to find the Transaction History grid.
This grid shows the Date, Transaction type, Carrier, Amount, and Balance remaining after each transaction.
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Click a specific transaction to see transaction details like the Shipment ID, Description, and Tracking number.
