A customer pays you $1,000 through Stripe. Some days later, $985.70 arrives in your bank. If your books record a $985.70 sale, they're wrong in three places at once: revenue is understated, fees are missing from your costs, and your GST or sales tax base is off.
Multiply by every transaction and every platform, and this becomes the most common source of error we find in new clients' books. Here's the full mechanics, and the routine that keeps it clean.
What a payout actually contains
Platforms batch your transactions and pay the net. One Stripe payout might contain 14 sales, two refunds, a chargeback with its fee, and processing fees on everything — one bank line standing in for 30-plus events. The correct accounting unpacks it:
- Each sale recorded at its gross amount, as revenue.
- Processing fees recorded as an expense (typically 1.7–2.9 per cent plus a fixed per-transaction fee, varying by country and card type).
- Refunds recorded against revenue, not as a cost.
- Chargebacks recorded with their separate dispute fee.
- The payout itself matched against all of the above through a clearing account — which then returns to zero.
The clearing account is the control. When every event is recorded and every payout matched, its balance is just the few days of money in transit. When it holds more, something upstream is unrecorded or double-recorded, and the balance is the running total of the errors.
A worked example
September, one Shopify store, A$118,000 of gross sales. The books that only recorded deposits showed A$114,100 of "revenue". What actually happened:
| Item | Amount (A$) |
|---|---|
| Gross sales | 118,000 |
| Refunds | (2,360) |
| Processing fees | (1,540) |
| Net deposited | 114,100 |
Example data. Figures are illustrative.
Recording only the deposit hides A$1,540 of real cost, understates refund volume (a figure worth tracking in its own right, since a rising refund rate is an early signal of a product issue), and in Australia would put GST reporting out by the difference. Over a year, that store's books were understating costs by roughly A$18,000 and carrying a GST exposure nobody had noticed.
The complications worth knowing about
Chargebacks. A disputed charge claws back the sale and adds a fee (typically A$15–25). It needs its own expense line, because chargeback rate is a metric card networks act on — above roughly 0.9 per cent, platforms can put you in monitoring programs with higher fees.
Reserves. Platforms sometimes hold a percentage of your volume for 30–90 days, especially after rapid growth or a spike in disputes. Held funds are your asset and belong on the balance sheet; books that ignore reserves show cash mysteriously below what sales suggest, and the founder's first sign is usually a confusing bank balance.
Multi-currency. A USD sale settled into an AUD account picks up a conversion spread (typically 1–2 per cent on top of processing fees). If you sell in three currencies, that spread is a real cost line worth seeing — it's often larger than the software budget.
Sales tax collected by the platform. In the US, marketplaces often collect and remit sales tax for you; money that passes through but was never yours must not touch the revenue line.
Setting it up properly in Xero
One clearing account per platform — never a shared one, or mismatches become untraceable. Stripe's Xero feed, or A2X for Shopify and Amazon, posts summarised daily or per-payout journals that split gross sales, fees and refunds automatically; bank rules then match deposits against the clearing account. For modest volumes a manual monthly journal from the platform's report works too. The tool matters less than the rule: gross in, fees out, clearing to zero.
The weekly check
- Open each clearing account. The balance should equal the last few days' unsettled sales — compare it against the platform's own "pending payout" figure, which gives you an exact target, to the cent.
- Investigate anything older than the payout cycle. One unmatched payout is a mistake; a growing balance is a process failure.
- Once a month, tie the platform's gross sales report to the revenue in your ledger. They should reconcile exactly.
Fifteen minutes a week. The businesses that skip it tend to encounter a full year's accumulation of the problem during due diligence, where it is far more costly to resolve.