In this guide 6 sections
A payout is a net amount. It bundles many orders, then subtracts processing fees, tax on those fees, refunds, chargebacks and sometimes a held reserve before anything reaches the bank. Your books hold gross invoices. No single line agrees. Match payouts to transaction lists, never invoices.
The bank shows one credit, the ledger shows forty invoices
Open a Stripe, Razorpay or PayPal payout and you will find one bank credit, behind which sit dozens of captured payments from yesterday and last Thursday. Some lines are negative, for refunds. One credit. Many orders.
Your accounting file works the other way round, with one invoice per order at the full price the customer saw and no trace of the payout. They cannot agree line by line.
Finance teams lose whole afternoons ticking bank rows against invoice numbers that never appeared on the statement, because the gateway reports only the batch, so the ticking never ends. Stop doing that.
Where the difference goes
Start with the fee. The gateway keeps its processing charge before paying you, and many also charge tax on that fee, so the payout lands smaller than the sum of the orders.
Refunds work in reverse, since a refund issued on Monday for a March order comes off Tuesday’s payout as a negative line. A chargeback is worse. The bank takes the amount back and often adds a dispute fee, which the gateway then passes on to you as another deduction.
Then comes timing. Settlement runs a day or several days after capture, and weekends shift it again, so an order can sit in this month’s sales and next month’s payout. Currency adds a wrinkle. A payout in one currency for orders priced in another carries the gateway’s settlement day rate, so each order can differ from its invoice by a small fraction. Record that as its own line.
- Processing fee per transaction
- Tax charged on the fee
- Refunds from earlier orders
- Chargebacks and dispute fees
- Rolling reserve held back
- Currency conversion differences
What the integration must store
Settlement records beat smarter spreadsheets. For every payout, the integration should pull the gateway’s balance transaction report and save each line as a charge, refund, fee, adjustment or dispute. Nothing else will do.
Each line needs the order reference your shop attached at checkout, because without that key a charge is only an amount and a date. With it, the line joins an invoice.
Keep the payout ID on every line, because that ID is the only bridge between the gateway report and the bank statement, and dropping it breaks the match. Never drop it.
- Payout ID and expected arrival date
- Gateway transaction ID
- Your order or invoice number
- Gross amount, fee, fee tax and net
- Line type and original charge date
How the entries should be posted
Post the gross sale at invoice. When the payout lands, post one bank entry for the net and book the fees and the fee tax as expenses from the settlement lines. A clearing account sits between them.
Each payout should return the clearing account to zero, and if it does not, one line is missing and you know which payout to reopen. It takes minutes, not days.
Test with the monthly trial balance. A clearing account that still holds an old balance after several weeks tells you precisely which payout was never fully read in by the integration. Chase it.
Check one payout before you automate
Take last month’s largest payout, rebuild it from the gateway report, add the charges, subtract the fees, refunds and disputes, and compare the result with the bank credit. Note every line type you meet.
Send that list to whoever builds the sync, because it names exactly which line types the clearing account must handle before the first real payout arrives. Do this before any code.
Payout matching worksheet
One block per payout. The header holds payout ID, bank date and bank amount, and a table below lists each line by type, order number, gross, fee, fee tax and net. A footer row shows the difference. The footer must read zero.
Open a blank worksheet to printQuestions owners ask
Why does the payout arrive days after the order?
The gateway holds funds for a settlement period after capture, and bank holidays push the date further, so the cash often lands after the sale month has closed. A clearing account absorbs that gap.
Can I match a payout to a single invoice?
Only if the payout held exactly one payment and the gateway took no fee, a case that almost never happens once refunds, fee tax and reserves enter the batch. Match payouts to line sets first. Then match each line to its invoice.
What should I do with chargebacks?
Record the reversal against the original invoice and book the dispute fee as an expense, then leave the line open until the gateway reports the outcome. Wins return later as positive lines.
Does a Stripe, Razorpay or PayPal export differ?
Column names differ between providers, yet each one supplies a per-payout transaction report that lists every charge, refund, fee and dispute inside the batch. Map each line type into your own standard set once, so the books never depend on one provider’s wording or on a renamed column after an update.