Balancing merchant bank account to zero

I honestly need help here as i cant find out where i have made a mistake.
My stripe account is in positive balance whilst my PayPal account is in negative balance.

They both should be at zero balance after tagging and i cant find what i might have missed.

Hi @KHE

A common error is not logging all the fees correctly on the accounts. Have you logged all the fees for the accounts?

Generally speaking, you should have 3 transactions for every 1. If you collected £100.00 from a client via PayPal, then they also take a fee (let’s keep it simple at £5.00).

You would then have, in the PayPal or Stripe account:

  1. The £100.00 as money in, tagged to the relevant invoice
  2. The £5.00 as money out, tagged to a supplier invoice (for the fees to Stripe, PayPal, GoCardless, etc.)
  3. The remaining £95.00 as money out, tagged as a transfer to your current account.

PayPal may also have a negative balance if you’ve used it to buy something online and used it to pay. Any money waiting to clear (such as that pending to come out of your bank account) will result in a negative balance.

We can offer general advice here, like how it should be logged in QuickFile, but we’re not able to help with individual cases unfortunately. I can however direct you towards a panel of accountants and bookkeepers who may be able to take a look and help further. Please let me know if you would like more information about this.

i will really appreciate more information please

No problem! When you’ve logged into your account, there’s a link in the top right hand corner:

If you click this, it will give you the option to contact our panel with just a few account details. Each accountant or bookkeeper will respond to you directly.

One other tool you may wish to look at, is the reconsiliation tool. If you use small time periods (e.g. a week, or month) and compare your QuickFile values against the values on Stripe or PayPal directly, then you will hopefully be able to find the issue on your own. There’s more information on this tool here.

I hope that helps, but please let me know if you require more help.

I’ve had similar issues in the past - one thing that normally catches me out is to make sure you factor in the transaction time(s) at each of the stages.

For example:

Step 1] Customer pays via card -> you generate a sale in QF -> payment tagged to Merchant account.
Step 2] Merchant validates the payment, initiates funds transfer and deducts fees.
Step 3] Funds credited to your bank account.

Timeframe in my experience (using our Merchant):

Step1 ->Step2 is usually 24hrs
Step2 ->Step3 72hrs

I.e. we normally receive payment into our account around 3-4 (working) days after the purchase.

Bank Holidays, Weekends and the actual service agreement you have with your Merchant (they are not all the same) can obviously impact the lead times on the steps above.

Therefore…even if you are supper diligent and process all transactions into QF immediately :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: (!) it all still depends on when in the process you are looking at the merchant account. There will always be a discrepancy until the funds have cleared completely in your account; either for payments that are ‘in progress’ (Steps 1&2) or for funds awaiting clearance at your bank (Steps 3).

Tldr; It’s normal!

Hope this helps.

John.

I have found the problem with stripe, i imported an item twice hence the positive balance.

On PayPal, i used funds from it for business purchases and the cost of items are higher than the income from sale.

How do i reconcile this please?

@KHE - You would need to enter any transactions into QuickFile that are missing. If your purchase was higher than any sales income, I would imagine that PayPal would request funds from a credit/debit card, or by Direct Debit. In this case, you would record it as a transfer from whichever account.

So, for example, if they requested £5.00 from your card, you would record a transaction in the PayPal account of £5.00 as money in, and tag it as a transfer from your card bank account.

Thanks a lot,both accounts are now down to zero balance

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