Stop 2 of 8 · Weekly
Shopify payouts
One number lands in the bank. Claude takes it apart into gross, refunds, fees and sales tax, and shows you the timing difference.
The deposit is not the sale
CL-02 sells skincare on Shopify. On a good Tuesday the bank shows one deposit and nothing else. Inside that deposit are the day's orders, the refunds Shopify already took back out, the processing fees, the sales tax the store collected on behalf of five states, and whatever chargeback or reserve adjustment landed that day.
Booking the deposit to sales is the single most common thing Farid inherits from clients who did their own books for a year. It overstates revenue, hides the fee expense, and buries a sales tax liability that is going to be asked for later.
The five components
| Component | Where it goes |
|---|---|
| Gross sales | Sales income |
| Refunds | Contra sales, never netted into gross |
| Shopify and payment fees | Merchant fees expense |
| Sales tax collected | Sales tax payable, a liability |
| Net deposit | Bank, clearing the balance |
Shopify admin, Finances, Payouts, Export gives you all five per payout. Farid pulls a month at a time and drops it in one client folder.
The timing difference, explained once
Orders placed on the 29th and 30th of the month pay out on the 2nd. If sales are booked when the cash lands, the month ends short and the next month starts long, and the P&L the owner reads is wrong in both directions. The clearing account holds the sale from the moment the order is placed until the payout arrives, and the balance in it at month end should equal the payouts in transit. When it does not, that is stop 5.
[upload CL-02's Shopify payout export for the month] For each payout, give me a table row: payout date, gross sales, refunds, fees, sales tax collected, adjustments, net deposit. Total every column at the bottom. Then list any payout where the components do not add to the net, with the gap.
Using the totals above and the chart of accounts I uploaded, draft the journal entry for the month with debits and credits, clearing the Shopify clearing account against the deposits that hit the bank. Show the arithmetic under the entry. Mark any line where you had to assume which account I use, and list those assumptions at the end so I can confirm them before I post anything.
From the same export, list every payout that settled in a different month than the orders inside it. For each one, show the order dates, the payout date, the net amount, and what should still be sitting in the clearing account at month end. Do not tell me which period to book it in.