Payouts are not showing up on balance / P&L sheets

Accounting
1

Hello,

I have an issue with my P/L and balance sheets.

I run e-Commerce businesses using Shopify along with Shopify payments as my payment processor.

I have an account created under “Merchant and online payment service accounts” for my payouts that I receive from Shopify. It is called: Stripe payments UK Limited (Shopify)

The reason I created it was to explain where I got my money from.

On my balance sheet, in the liabilities section (1254), I have my stripe payouts shown there (Stripe payments UK Limited – Shopify), but it not supposed to be there.

My P/L sheet therefore cannot be correct, as my payouts are not included.

My payouts in the Stripe payments UK Limited (Shopify) account were tagged as a bank transfer to my business bank account, therefore the account is in negative.

What should I do in this situation? Can I exclude this from liabilities somehow? Or should I include them as general sales?

Thanks

2

Sounds like there’s an issue with your merchant account. If money is going in then transferring out the balance would be 0. Sounds like it’s missing transactions.

3

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your answer.

This merchant account mostly contains “money out” transactions (my payouts), and the monthly fees for hosting that I pay for Shopify (money in).

I always export everything from my bank statements and checked everything twice, all of my payments, in and out are represented in this merchant account.

This is how my “cashflow” looks like:

I make a sale -> Shopify will issue a payout to me -> I receive it in my business bank account

The issue might be with that I don’t have a record of these customers paying me individually. Paypal for example, states every sale as a single payment to my balance, and then I can issue a payout from my PP account.

However, Shopify issues payouts every 3-4th day in bulk. It does not matter how many customers purchased, it will not state them individually but paying me out in “bulk”. For instance, if I had 50 sales for 500 pounds, than it will send me 1 payout of 500 pounds.

4

So as your example. How do you record the 50 customer sales?

I’d have thought there’d be 50 sales all tagged as paid in full from the merchant account, then a money out for the fees then the balance as a transfer to your main account. Resulting in a zero balance.

5

I exported the payout amounts as they are in my bank statement.

Your example would be good, but I have one problem: How do I explain where the funds came from? I created this merchant account to represent that I got these funds from Shopify.

Or a solution could be to me creating invoices for these payouts for the exact amount as Shopify have sent me as “Sales”, along with a Supplier as Stripe Payments UK Ltd (Shopify) sales?

Then this might be able to represent that I got my funds from my customers through Shopify, and I could also make my balance to zero, possibly solving the issue?

6

Yes that would work. It sounds like the best solution to your issue.