Why credits_ongoing_balance can lag behind credits_balance after a paid top-up

After a paid wallet top-up settles, credits_balance updates right away, but credits_ongoing_balance can take longer to catch up. This happens because the ongoing balance refresh runs as a background job, and under heavy platform load that job can queue up and run with a delay rather than instantly. The lag is usually a few seconds but can stretch to tens of minutes during a load spike.

How the ongoing balance refresh works

credits_balance reflects the wallet's settled balance and updates synchronously when a top-up settles. credits_ongoing_balance is meant to reflect the balance including in-flight, not-yet-invoiced usage, and it is recalculated by an asynchronous refresh job rather than updated inline with the top-up. Because that refresh runs as a background job, its timing depends on the job queue. Normal usage and subscription events trigger the same kind of refresh, so the ongoing balance can also catch up as a side effect of any of those events, not just from the top-up itself.

What to expect

A short delay between a top-up settling and credits_ongoing_balance reflecting it is expected behavior, not a bug, since the refresh is asynchronous. The delay is normally brief, but it scales with how backed up background processing is at that moment. A delay of several tens of minutes points to platform-level load rather than something wrong with the specific wallet or top-up.

This article reflects guidance drawn from customer case resolutions. It is not officially supported documentation and may not apply to all situations.