The deposit doesn't match the sales report

Why the numbers never match

If you sell online, you've probably seen this. The store says you sold a certain amount on Tuesday. On Thursday a deposit lands in the bank from your payment processor, and it's a different number. Not wildly different. Just different enough that somebody has to work out why before the books can close.

There's nothing wrong. The two numbers are measuring different things.

Your sales report counts orders placed on a day. The deposit is a payout: a batch of money the processor sends you, usually covering transactions from more than one day, minus the processor's fees, minus refunds you issued, minus any chargebacks or disputes, sometimes minus money held in reserve. It arrives after a delay that depends on your processor and your account. Payouts can also include things that aren't sales at all, like a dispute you won or an adjustment.

Stripe and Shopify Payments, like most processors, give you reports at the payout level for exactly this reason. Stripe's payout reconciliation report exists to match each payout in your bank account to the batch of transactions it settles. Shopify Payments has a payouts view and an activity report that breaks down transactions, fees and payouts.

So the job isn't really "find out why Tuesday doesn't match." It's three smaller matches, done in the right order. Here's the walk-through.

Step one: match the deposit to the payout

Start at the bank, because that's the money you actually have.

Every deposit from a processor should line up with exactly one payout on the processor's side, with the same amount and a date close to it. Most processors put a reference in the bank description. Your accounting tool may already pull bank lines in automatically.

This step is easy to automate and should almost never need a person. Match on amount and reference first, amount and date window second. When a deposit has no payout, or a payout has no deposit after a few working days, flag it. That's either a timing difference or something worth a phone call to your processor.

One trap: if you use more than one processor (cards through one, buy-now-pay-later through another, a marketplace paying you separately) each needs its own matching. They all land in the same bank account and they all look like "deposit."

Step two: break the payout into its pieces

Now open the payout. The processor's payout report lists every transaction inside it: the charges, the refunds, the fees, the disputes, the adjustments. Add them up and they should equal the payout. If they don't, stop and ask the processor, because that's their report disagreeing with their own payment.

Here is a simple illustrative example, with round numbers that don't come from anyone's real account. A payout of 9,400 might be 10,000 in charges, minus 300 in processor fees, minus 250 in refunds, minus 50 for one chargeback. The sales report for the days involved might show 10,200, because it also counts two orders that were paid but whose money hasn't been paid out yet. Both numbers are right.

For your books, this is the step that matters most. Fees should be recorded as fees, not quietly netted out of revenue. Refunds and chargebacks should be recorded against the orders they belong to. If your accountant has been booking each deposit as "sales," the fees and refunds have been disappearing into a smaller revenue number, and that makes it harder to see what payments actually cost you.

Step three: match each transaction to an order

Each charge in the payout should point to an order in your store, through an order number, a payment ID or a checkout reference. Each refund should point to a refund in the store. This is where most of the leftovers turn up:

• A refund issued straight from the processor's dashboard, not the store, so the store never recorded it.
• An order paid partly with a gift card or store credit, so the card charge is smaller than the order total.
• A charge for something that isn't a store order at all, like a phone order typed into a card terminal or a deposit taken by invoice.
• Two charges for one order after a customer retried a payment.
• A chargeback for an order from three months ago.

Each of these has a reason, and each one needs a person to decide what it means. But they should be the only things that need a person.

Let the machine match and the person decide

Once the three steps are written down, most of the work is matching, and matching is what software is good at. A small reconciliation job, run daily or when each payout arrives, can:

1. Pull the bank lines, the processor's payout reports and the store's orders and refunds.
2. Match deposits to payouts, payouts to transactions and transactions to orders.
3. Post the matched totals to your accounting tool, with fees, refunds and chargebacks booked separately.
4. Put everything that didn't match on one short list, with the reason it didn't match.

The list is the useful part. It shouldn't say "something is wrong somewhere." It should say "refund of 42 issued in the processor dashboard on the 14th, no matching store refund" or "deposit of 1,180 on the 16th, no payout found yet." Someone in finance clears the list, and every item they clear teaches you a rule: refunds only from the store, gift cards booked a certain way, phone orders tagged at the terminal.

Reconcile the payout, not the day. The day was never what the bank received.

Where to start this week

Pick last month. Take the processor's payout report, your bank statement and your store's order export. Do the three matches once by hand for one week of payouts and write down every item that didn't match and why. That list is the specification for whatever you automate. It tells you which rules you need and which mistakes your team makes most often.

Then decide who owns the leftovers list, and how quickly it should be cleared. A list nobody owns grows quietly until the year-end close.

If your payouts stop for some reason, the same matching tells you exactly what's outstanding. That's covered in Plan for the week your payouts stop.

We build business automation for the repeated, careful work between your store, your processor and your books, so people spend their time on the exceptions. If Friday afternoons go to reconciling deposits, talk to us.

Related work: WorkStep.