# What to do if I cannot receive a payment

You might have encountered error messages in the sending app or you are waiting for a payment from your friend but it hasn't arrived yet.

## Go through the following steps: **🧑‍🔧**

#### **General**

* [ ] Is your Alby Hub online (i.e. connected to the internet)?
* [ ] Is the payment channel online on the Node page of your Hub?\
  You don't have a channel with receiving capacity yet, use this guide:[Increase receiving capacity](/user-guide/alby-hub/node/increase-receiving-capacity.md)
* [ ] Is the *Receiving Capacity* high enough to receive the payment?\
  As a rule of thumb keep at least twice the receiving capacity of the expected payment in one of your payment channels.
* [ ] Did you open a public channel? Restart your node by clicking [this link](https://getalby.com/hub_deployment/edit?force=1).
* [ ] [Update](/user-guide/alby-hub/alby-hub-flavors/updating.md) your Alby Hub if necessary and unlock it afterwards

#### Lightning Network Connectivity

* [ ] Is your payment channel partner well connected in the network?\
  1\) Don't worry about that if your channel partner is Megalith, LNServer, Olympus, Flashsats or LQWD.\
  2\) You can look up the name on Amboss.space and scroll through the list of channel partners. The higher the Terminal Web rank the better. If you can't find out anything, let us know.
* [ ] Plus point: Does the sender have well connected channel partners that have enough receiving capacity / inbound liquidity?\
  If the sender uses a known custodial lightning wallet, that should be fine.

#### If receiving still doesn't work, share the following information with us using the chat widget on support.getalby.com: 📨

1. The registered email address with your Alby account
2. The name of the app the payment sent from
3. Any error message that appears in the sending app
4. A screenshot of the "Node" page of your Alby Hub

Thanks. We appreciate that you went through the first steps yourself. 💛


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