Splitting a processor payout back into sales and fees
The deposit that lands in the bank is net. Fees came out, refunds came out, and a disputed charge may have been clawed back days after the sale it relates to. Coding that one line to income understates revenue and expense at the same time, and it quietly moves the base the sales tax return is built on. What works is a clearing account that receives gross activity by date and empties as each payout arrives. Shopify Payments and Klarna settle on their own cycles, so one merchant can carry several clearing balances open across a month end.
Everything is finished and the return still cannot be filed, because the signature authorisation has not come back.
The trial balance is the centre of this work, and most of the repeated labour is getting source material into a shape the trial balance can accept. Statements arrive as PDFs, receipts arrive as photographs, and bank data arrives through an aggregator that authenticates against a bank which changes its login flow without notice.
- QuickBooks Online
- Xero
- Excel
When this is the wrong thing to build
Pick something else if the merchant runs a single processor with daily settlement and almost no refunds, since the net deposit then differs from gross by one fee line that a bank rule can code on its own. A clearing account there is ceremony, and it gives a reviewer one more balance to explain.
The constraint that shapes it
Tax return information is governed by a statute that makes disclosure or use outside preparation a criminal matter, with a parallel civil penalty, and consent has to be obtained in a prescribed form naming the recipient and the purpose. More on how this sector works.
Two sources of truth. One queue of the rows that do not line up. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.
- Rebuilding an annual operating expense reconciliation from the lease
- Reconciling a broker trust account three ways every month
- Matching a closed transaction back to the lead that produced it
- Collapsing two overlapping MLS feeds into one property list
- Widening a conflicts search past exact spelling
- Rebuilding a billable day from the trail the systems already keep
- Why does my Stripe deposit not match my sales in QuickBooks?
- How do I record Shopify payouts and fees in QuickBooks Online?
- What clearing account setup handles refunds and chargebacks from a processor?
- Why is my sales tax wrong when I book net payouts as revenue?
- How do I reconcile a payout that straddles two different months?
Back to accounting and bookkeeping, or see how this is priced and scoped.