# Payment methods & wallet

Every charge on Bird — the plan renewal, email overage, each SMS — is drawn from your organization's **wallet**, a single prepaid balance shared by all your workspaces. A saved **card** exists to fill that wallet: top-ups, auto top-up, and covering a renewal the balance can't. Understand those two pieces and the rest of billing is just bookkeeping.

Everything here lives on the [**Billing and payments**](https://bird.com/dashboard) Overview page: the wallet sidebar shows your available balance and next charge, with rows for auto top-up, the low balance alert, payment methods, and your billing address. It's managed by organization owners and billing admins.

## The wallet

The sidebar's headline number is your **available balance** — the wallet balance minus anything reserved for charges currently in flight. Below it, **Next charge** shows the date and amount of your upcoming renewal, and warns you early if the balance won't cover it.

Two states are worth recognizing:

- **Running low.** A dismissible banner appears when you're under your alert threshold, and your billing contacts get an email. Top up before the renewal date and nothing else happens.
- **Empty or negative.** Pay-as-you-go products (SMS, WhatsApp) pause when the wallet can't cover them, and a negative balance stops sending entirely until it's paid. Email within your plan's included volume is the exception — that's covered by the plan, not the balance.

## Topping up

**Add funds** on the Overview page opens the top-up flow: pick an amount (the minimum is 15 EUR/USD), confirm, and pay by card. The first time, you'll be asked for your billing address and VAT number — invoices can't be issued without them, so the flow collects them once and remembers.

A completed top-up shows the new balance immediately, appears as a credit on the [**Spend**](https://bird.com/dashboard) page, and gets its own payment receipt (separate from your monthly invoice, which only covers charges).

## Auto top-up

If you send continuously, configure **Auto top-up** from the wallet sidebar: set a minimum balance and a refill amount, and whenever the balance drops below the minimum, Bird charges your default card for the refill. It's the difference between billing being an operational concern and not — nobody has to remember anything, and pay-as-you-go sending never pauses on a quietly empty wallet.

Automatic top-ups land on the Spend page like any other, so the ledger stays complete. The **Low balance alert** row is the lighter-touch alternative: no automatic charge, just an email to your billing contacts when the balance crosses your threshold. You can run both — the alert threshold sits below the auto top-up one, as a second line of defense for a failing card.

## Payment methods

The **Payment method** row lists your saved cards. The **default** card is the one that matters: it backs auto top-up and covers renewal shortfalls (see [Plan changes & renewals](/docs/knowledge-base/billing/plan-changes-and-renewals) for how a renewal splits between wallet and card).

- **Adding a card** verifies it without charging it — some banks show a temporary authorization that reverses automatically.
- **Make default** switches which card future charges use; past transactions are unaffected.
- **A card that declined its last charge** is flagged in the list. Replace it promptly: a stale default card plus an empty wallet is the one combination that leads to the failed-renewal path.
- You can't remove the default card while other cards exist — make another card the default first.

## Billing details

Your billing address and VAT number feed directly onto your invoices. The **Billing address** row on the Overview page edits them, and can set a separate invoice address if your billing entity differs from your registered one. The [**Settings**](https://bird.com/dashboard) page holds the **billing contact** — the primary email billing and account notifications go to — and lists every subscription your organization holds: the plan, add-ons like dedicated IPs and phone numbers, and any scheduled changes.

![The billing Settings page: the billing contact email and the subscriptions table with product, status, quantity, and current period](/images/docs/dashboard-billing-settings.png)

Point the billing contact at a team alias, not a person. Low-balance warnings, payment failures, invoices, and plan-change confirmations all go there, and every one of them is only useful if someone reads it in time.

## Next steps

- [Plan changes & renewals](/docs/knowledge-base/billing/plan-changes-and-renewals) — how renewals draw on the wallet and card, and the failed-payment timeline.
- [Usage, spend & invoices](/docs/knowledge-base/billing/usage-and-invoices) — the ledger and the monthly bill.
- How top-ups and the wallet ledger work behind these pages is in [Billing & usage](/docs/guides/billing-and-usage).