Why a Stripe payout isn't your revenue
The amount Stripe pays into your bank is what is left of your sales after fees and refunds have come off. If you book that amount as revenue, both your sales and your costs come out too low. The same goes for Mollie, PayPal and Shopify Payments.
What's inside one payout
Stripe collects your customers' payments in a balance and pays that balance out to your bank in batches. One line on your bank statement can stand for dozens of sales, a few refunds and a fee on every transaction. Stripe's own payout reconciliation report lists every payment, refund, dispute, fee and other transaction in each payout.
| Part of the payout | What it is | Where it belongs in your books |
|---|---|---|
| Gross sales | What your customers paid | Revenue |
| Refunds | Money you paid back to customers | A reduction of revenue |
| Fees | What Stripe kept for processing the payments | Costs |
| Disputes | Payments a customer's bank pulled back, plus the dispute fee | A reduction of revenue, and the fee under costs |
| Reserves and adjustments | Money held back or released, and corrections | A balance with the provider, until it is paid out or settled |
| Net payout | What arrived in your bank account | The bank transaction that ties it all together |
The net payout is the result of everything above it. On its own it tells you little about your profit.
What goes wrong when the payout is booked as revenue
- Revenue is too low, because the fees and refunds have already come off
- Your payment costs are missing from your costs, so you cannot see what Stripe costs you
- Refunds disappear, and with them a signal about your product or your customers
- Your sales invoices and your VAT return start from what customers paid, so neither matches the revenue in your books
- Months stop lining up, because a payout can cover sales from several days and a refund can come off a payout weeks after the sale
When your accountant does the year-end, these differences have to be found and corrected. It is less work to split each payout as it comes in.
Refunds, disputes and reserves
A refund is money you choose to give back. Stripe takes it from your balance, so it comes off the next payout, even when the original sale was in an earlier month.
A dispute, or chargeback, is started by your customer's bank. Stripe takes the disputed amount and a dispute fee from your balance straight away. If you win, the disputed amount comes back. Stripe does not return the fee for receiving the dispute.
A reserve is part of your balance that a provider holds back for a while and releases later. Until then it is still your money, held by the provider. It belongs on a balance sheet account for that provider.
Mollie, PayPal and Shopify Payments
The other providers work the same way. Mollie pays out in settlements. Each settlement shows the revenue per payment method and the costs Mollie withheld, and Mollie invoices those costs separately. Shopify Payments deducts its processing fees before it sends a payout, and its payout page breaks a payout down into charges, refunds, adjustments, fees and reserves. For PayPal the same split applies. What reaches your bank is a transfer from your PayPal balance, and the sales, refunds and fees behind it are in PayPal.
If you use more than one provider, each needs its own balance account in your package. Then you can see per provider whether everything it received has been paid out.
Fee invoices and VAT
Stripe makes its tax invoices for fees available in the Documents section of your Stripe Dashboard. Stripe says it supplies its services from Ireland and does not add VAT to its fees for businesses in the Netherlands. Whether you have to account for VAT on those fees yourself, and where that goes in your return, is a question for your accountant. Stripe says the same.
If you sell goods to consumers in other EU countries, a separate rule applies. Up to €10,000 a calendar year in such sales, Dutch VAT usually applies. Above that, you charge the VAT of your customer's country. The Belastingdienst lets you declare that in one quarterly return through the Union scheme of the One Stop Shop (OSS). Which rate applies to which sale is tax advice, and that stays with your accountant.
How we handle payouts
We connect Stripe, Mollie, PayPal and Shopify Payments with a read-only key. With it we can read your payouts, and we cannot pay, refund or change anything. For each payout we split the amount into:
- Sales, minus what you refunded
- Fees, which is what the provider kept
- Other, for chargebacks, reserves and anything that is neither a sale nor a fee
The net is always what the provider says it paid out, so every payout adds up to the cent. What we cannot place under sales or fees stays visible under Other. We book it in your own package, and a bookkeeper checks it before we close the month. More on this on our page about online shops.
We don't do payroll, annual accounts or tax advice. That stays with your accountant. Our prices are €49, €129 or €289 per administration per month, excl. VAT. See prices.
Frequently asked questions
- One payout covers hundreds of orders. Does that count as hundreds of transactions on my plan?
- No. Your plan counts bank transactions. One payout is one bank transaction, however many sales are behind it.
- My Stripe dashboard shows a different total from my bank. Which one is right?
- Usually both. The dashboard shows sales, and your bank shows what was paid out after fees, refunds and disputes. Splitting each payout shows exactly where the difference sits.
- Do you handle VAT on sales to other EU countries?
- We book the sales as your provider reports them. Questions about VAT in other EU countries, including the One Stop Shop, are tax advice, and that stays with your accountant.