What is the difference between prepay and postpay?
On prepay you add funds and ads run until the balance is gone; nothing is owed and nothing accrues. On postpay the account spends first and Google charges afterwards, when accrued cost reaches the billing threshold or thirty days after the last automatic payment, whichever comes first.
Why this matters when buying. A prepay account has no threshold to inherit, however much it has spent.
If an account is on prepay and the seller is quoting a threshold, one of the two statements is wrong.
What is a payments profile and where does it sit?
The payments profile holds the payer's details: address, tax information, language and the payment methods themselves. It sits below the Google Ads account rather than inside it, and one profile can serve more than one account. Changing it is not the same as changing the account's billing settings.
This distinction is where handovers go wrong. An account can change hands while the payments profile still belongs to the previous holder, which means the person who sold you the account still controls how it pays.
Who can change billing?
| Access level | Billing powers |
|---|---|
| Email only | none |
| Read only | views billing, runs billing reports |
| Billing | views and edits billing, manages payment forms and the payments profile, pays and adds funds, switches prepay and postpay, adjusts the threshold on postpay |
| Standard | edits billing, pays and adds funds, switches postpay to prepay, adjusts the threshold on postpay |
| Admin | everything above, plus switching between prepay and postpay in both directions |
Two details worth knowing. Admin and billing users can update the payments profile even when they are not payments profile users.
And an account with only one admin loses control of its tags if that person becomes unavailable — one admin is the minimum and also a risk.
Which billing screens do you open before paying?
- Billing → Summary — current balance, payment method, anything outstanding. An unpaid balance transfers with the account.
- Billing → Transactions, widened to the full life of the account — dated charges and payments, one row at a time. Compare it against whatever you were told.
- Billing → Settings — country, currency, prepay or postpay. Currency and time zone cannot be changed later.
- Admin → Access and security — not billing, but open it in the same pass: this is where a leftover administrator shows up.
Common questions
Can an account switch between prepay and postpay?
Admin users can switch in both directions. Standard users can switch from postpay to prepay only, and billing users can switch either way. Switching is not free of consequences: a threshold belongs to postpay, and moving to prepay and back does not preserve it as though nothing happened.
What is a payments profile?
The payments profile holds the payer details — address, tax information, language — and sits underneath the Google Ads account rather than inside it. Admin and billing users can update it even when they are not payments profile users themselves, which surprises people during handovers.
See it before you pay
Every account here is opened and walked through on these screens before any money moves.
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