Money: payments, payouts and deposits

How a payment is recorded

Each paid order becomes an invoice plus a payment applied to it. The payment waits in Undeposited Funds (Settings, Payments, “Payments wait in”), the same way a check waits before you take it to the bank.

Card processors do not pay out order by order: they send one transfer for many orders, minus their fees and any refunds. Waiting in Undeposited Funds lets each transfer become one deposit that equals the bank line, so reconciling is a matter of ticking one line.

Payout deposits (paid plans)

For WooPayments and Stripe, the plugin reads each paid payout from the gateway and makes one deposit:

• every payment of the payout, taken from Undeposited Funds;
• every refund of the payout, as a minus line;
• the processor’s fees and adjustments as their own lines (fee account in Settings);
• dated on the payout date, into the bank account you chose.

Before writing, it checks that the lines add up to the bank amount. A small difference (processors round fees per charge) goes to the fee account. A difference over 5.00 stops the payout with the reason; that means something is missing, not rounding.

A payout waits while one of its orders or refunds is not booked yet (“Waiting for order 4826”). Book or skip the order it names; payouts are always deposited whole, so the deposit equals the bank line.

If a payment of the payout is no longer waiting in Undeposited Funds (for example someone deposited it by hand), the payout stops rather than guess.

A payout is only taken when the gateway answered in full: if reading it fails partway, it is read again on the next check, never deposited with lines missing. Payouts in another currency than the store’s are left for you, since QuickBooks Desktop keeps US books in dollars.

PayPal

PayPal keeps your money in your PayPal balance and you move it to the bank when you choose, so its transfers do not line up with orders. Record PayPal as its own bank account in QuickBooks:

• Settings, Payments, Account by gateway: pick your PayPal bank account for PayPal.
• PayPal payments land there; PayPal refunds come out of it.
• Moving money from PayPal to your bank is a transfer in QuickBooks, as with any two bank accounts.

Any gateway can have its own account this way. Those left on “Same as above” use the general account.

Card fees on the invoice

With “Take the card fee off each invoice” on (Settings, Payments), the processor’s fee is a minus line on the invoice, so the invoice equals the money you actually received. Leave it off to keep invoices at the order total and book fees on the deposit instead.

Fixing past payouts (paid plans)

If another tool booked payments one by one straight into the bank, the bank shows one line per payout while QuickBooks shows one per order. Fix past payouts on the Audit page:

1. reads the payments and refunds QuickBooks holds for the period you pick (nothing written);
2. shows, payout by payout, which payments it would move and the deposit it would make, to the cent;
3. after you tick payouts and confirm, moves each payment to Undeposited Funds, reads it again to check it is still applied to the same invoice, and makes one deposit equal to the bank line.

If anything changed in QuickBooks since the scan, every fix stops and nothing more is written.