“My payout report does not match my bank deposits”
A payment processor deposits net proceeds, but your sales happened gross. If you import the deposit and call it revenue, your books understate income by exactly the fees — and the fees are the part that is deductible, so the error costs money twice.
Symptoms
The bank deposit is smaller than the day’s sales total One deposit covers several days of transactions Refunds appear to reduce revenue rather than as their own entries
What actually causes it
Payouts are net of fees
The processor subtracts its percentage and per-transaction charge before transferring. Recording only the deposit means the fee never appears in your accounts, so revenue and expenses are both understated by the same figure.
Payouts batch several days of activity
A single transfer commonly covers a rolling period, so no deposit ever equals one day’s sales. Matching deposits to daily takings by eye fails for structural reasons rather than because something is wrong.
Refunds and chargebacks reduce a later payout
A refund issued today is deducted from a future transfer, not the one it relates to. That makes the affected payout look inexplicably small unless you read the payout report alongside the bank line.
How to fix it
- Import the payout report as the source of truth for sales and fees, and treat the bank deposit as a transfer that clears it.
- Where the processor offers a summary export with gross, fees and net as separate columns, use that rather than the transaction list.
- Check any CSV export with the tool below before mapping: these reports carry many columns, and a shifted mapping is easy to miss.
- Reconcile per payout rather than per day, since the payout is the unit the processor actually transferred.
Related import problems
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The checker reports the column structure of a processor export, which is what stops a shifted mapping from turning fees into amounts. Free, no signup, no upload.
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