Use Case Approval and Adding Additional Use Cases

Last updated: October 8, 2026

Every program on Astra starts with an approved use case. Before you sign your contract, our team reviews how you plan to move money and approves one or more use cases for your program.

Key terms

Use case: The reason you're moving money. It describes who is paying whom and why, such as paying contractors, collecting payments from customers, or sending refunds.

Flow of funds: The path your money takes to get there. It shows where the money starts, which accounts it passes through, how it's moved, and where it ends up.

In short, the use case is what you're doing with payments, and the flow of funds is how the money moves to make it happen.

For a closer look at how a payment is put together, see the Anatomy of a Payment Guide.

How use cases are approved

Use cases are approved through your program application, before contract signature. When you submit your program application, you describe the payments your program will make. The Astra team reviews each use case and approves the ones we can support.

Our compliance team reviews each new program application and will either approve it or send follow-up questions within 1 business day. The total time to approval depends on how quickly any follow-up questions are answered.

A single program can be approved for one use case or several. Your contract and implementation plan are then built around the use cases that were approved.

What the approval covers

Each approved use case defines five things about the payments you'll send:

  • Purpose of the transfer: the general reason the money is moving, such as payroll, refunds, or customer payouts.

  • Sender: whether the money comes from a personal user or a business user.

  • Payment instrument type: whether funds move using a card, bank account, FBO or other.

  • Recipient type: who receives the money, such as an individual or business.

  • Ultimate sender and receiver identification: whether a payment needs to identify the user who is ultimately sending or receiving the funds. This applies when money moves through an account your program owns or operates on a user's behalf, such as a pooled wallet account. See Ultimate Sender vs. Ultimate Receiver.

Payments that fall outside these approved details aren't covered by your use case and need a separate approval.

Adding a new use case

If your program needs to support payments beyond your original approval, you'll need to request approval for an additional use case.

  1. Ask the Astra team for an additional use case form.

  2. Complete the form with the details of your new use case and submit it.

  3. Astra's compliance team reviews the new use case and lets you know if it can be supported.

Additional use case forms follow the same timeline. Compliance will approve the form or send follow-up questions within 1 business day, and the total time depends on your responses to any follow-up questions.

After your new use case is approved

What happens next depends on whether you've already gone live with your original use cases.

If you're already live

You'll work with Astra's implementation team to take your new use case through the implementation process. This includes:

  • A new Sandbox Checklist, plus additional test cases if applicable

  • A new Production Checklist

  • A Sandbox API log review

  • A Production API log review

If you're still in implementation

You don't need to start a separate process. Your existing checklists will be updated to include the new use case, and you'll complete them as part of your current implementation.