Where to find your workspace balance

Your workspace’s balance is shown on the ‘Finance’ tab in the left sidebar and at the top of the Finance page. This balance represents the total funds available to launch new studies.

Workspace balance

This is the amount that is available for you to spend on further studies. When you publish a study, your workspace balance will decrease, as we’ll reserve funds to cover the cost of this study. All funds required for active studies (including those that are awaiting review) are reserved while these studies are running.

Please note that to increase places for a study, or to publish a new one, your workspace balance must be high enough to cover the costs of the additional participants. If you stop an active study before it reaches the number of maximum submissions, any unspent funds from the participants you did not recruit will be restored to your workspace balance for use elsewhere.

Platform fees

This is the amount of your total balance pre-paid to Prolific as platform fees. For relevant researchers, this will also include VAT.

Participant rewards

This is the amount of your total balance that you have available for participant payments. For example, this could be spent on approvals or bonus payments.

Why is my balance showing a negative / incorrect amount?

If you've recently processed a large number of approvals or bonus payments, it's possible that our system will still be processing these when you check your balance. Therefore, our system may temporarily display an incorrect balance (e.g. a negative amount).

When this occurs, and you're sure that you have no outstanding payments on any active studies, we'd recommend waiting ~10 minutes, then logging out and back in. This should give our system sufficient time to process any remaining payments, and refresh your balance to the correct amount.

If you still see an incorrect balance after logging back in and are not sure why, feel free to contact Support via the button below. 

Transfer balance to another workspace

For security and financial compliance reasons, we can only transfer funds between Prolific workspaces in exceptional circumstances.

To share funds with collaborators, we recommend adding them to a shared workspace. This allows all collaborators to access workspace funds for running studies and paying participants.

If you regularly receive funds from different sources, we recommend creating a workspace for each source. This helps match each workspace's office address to its funding source.

If these options don't suit your needs, you can request a refund of your remaining balance and then add those funds to your other workspace(s).

Change the currency of a workspace

Prolific offers workspaces in GBP and USD.

For blank workspaces without any funds or completed studies, you can contact Support to change the currency.

Once studies have been run in a workspace, its currency cannot be changed. In this case, you'll need to create a new workspace with your desired currency. You can then maintain separate workspaces in GBP and USD to use as needed.

To create a new workspace, click the drop-down menu in the top-left corner and select '+ New Workspace'. Add your workspace office address (your billing address) to the new workspace. Ensure this address matches the information you want on your invoices.

After setting up the workspace, contact Support to update its currency.

Remember that changing a workspace's currency is permanent and affects all workspace users.

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