The usual cause is your wallet, not the price
An invoice quotes an exact amount in the asset you chose, held for the window shown on the page. Most short payments come from a wallet deducting its own network fee from the figure you typed rather than adding it on top. The chain shows the amount you meant to send. The address receives slightly less than that.
Nothing is lost when it happens. Anything arriving against an invoice that does not cover it is credited to your account balance, and the invoice stays open for the difference.
Fixing a short payment
- Open the invoice. It shows what arrived, what is outstanding, and which transaction it matched.
- Pay the difference from balance if the balance covers it, or send the remainder to the same address while the invoice is still open.
- If the window has expired, the panel reissues at the current rate and the credit from the first payment carries across.
curl -s https://paragonvps.com/api/v1/invoices/<invoice-id> -H "Authorization: Bearer $Paragon_TOKEN" | jq '{status, total, paid, outstanding}'Overpayment
The excess goes to your balance. Nothing is returned to the chain automatically, because a refund transaction costs a fee and most people would rather keep the credit. Ask if you would rather have the coin.
Late payment
The rate on an invoice is valid for the window on the page. Send after it and the amount in the asset is stale even though the amount in euro is not, so the payment is credited at what it was worth when it confirmed. Covers the invoice, and the invoice closes. Falls short, and you are in the section above.
Being late in that sense costs you nothing. What costs you is the other clock — the due date, with a reminder at three days, suspension at seven, and destruction fourteen days after that.
Wrong chain, wrong asset, missing memo
Read this section before you send, because it is the one that is sometimes unrecoverable.
- A token sent over a network the invoice did not name, and the same ticker does exist on several chains, may be recoverable if an address is controlled there. It may equally not be. Send the transaction hash and we will tell you honestly which it is.
- An asset sent to an address belonging to a different asset is generally gone. Nobody can sign for a key that was never created.
- Chains using a memo or destination tag require it. A payment without one lands in a pooled address with nothing to attribute it to, and recovery becomes manual work on somebody else’s schedule.
The invoice page names the asset, the chain and the memo where there is one. Read that line rather than reusing an address from last month: they are single-use, and a payment to an expired one is a manual recovery at best.
Confirmations
An invoice settles when the chain confirms. Most assets clear in one to three confirmations. A transaction replaced by fee resets the count, so bumping the fee means waiting again rather than jumping a queue.
What to send us
The invoice number, the transaction hash, the asset and the chain. That is enough to match a payment by hand within a few minutes, and most cases never reach a human at all.
What we cannot do is find a payment from a description. “I sent it on Tuesday” is not a search key on any blockchain, and we hold no name to look you up by.