Why are my app's usage charge refunds failing?

[jessica_grav]

Our app issues usage charges based on orders.

Every once in a while, an order is refunded meaning we need to credit the store their usage charge back.

From June 14th to June 21st, Store A had total usage charges of about 1,315.00 USD. 

Of that amount, we tried to issue four separate credits.

The first was for 60.01. It succeeded.

But then every single credit attempt after that failed.

The docs say that if the sum of the usage charge is less than the attempted credit amount, it won't work. But that is clearly not the case here, usage charges are waaaaaaaaay more than credits.

We got some emails with an "explanation" but they aren't helpful.

Amount exceeded pending receivable credit issue limit (28.04)

The limit makes no sense based on what Shopify docs tell us the limit is. What is going on? How do we fix it?

[rye_dev_team]

We got the same issue. Any updates here?

[MauriceSensight]

same for me, not able to solve this 

[dog300]

We have also run into this problem, explanation below. To workaround this problem manually, you wait until the funds are pending and then issue a refund. But we haven't figured out how to workaround this problem using the API. If anyone has any adivce, it would be appreciated.

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We attempted to refund a usage charge of $115.58, but it was denied with the following error:

Amount exceeded pending receivable credit issue limit (17.40)

As it turns out, $17.40 matched our entire app's pending payout amount. This means that the usage charges we were attempting to refund were not yet pending. Looking at the documentation for the ApplicationCredit API, it says (with the key phrases bolded):

The total amount of all application credits requested by an app must not exceed the total amount the shop owner was charged in the last 30 days, or the total amount of pending payouts in the app's Partner account.

The latter part is what is caused the problem issuing the credit. It means we can't issue a credit until the usage charges are pending, which doesn't happen immediately. So we are only able to issue a usage charge credit if-and-only-if our pending payout amount for the app exceeds the refund amount -- there are a number of cases where it may not, especially just after a payout when our pending amount in $0.00.