Shopify payouts, explained.

What a payout is

When customers pay through Shopify Payments, the money goes into your Shopify Payments balance first. On a schedule, Shopify sends what's available to your bank. That transfer is the payout. It usually covers many orders, from several days.

What's inside it

So a payout is a net number. It also leaves out sales paid another way: PayPal, gift cards and manual payments never pass through Shopify Payments.

The common mistake

Booking each bank deposit as “sales”. It feels right, but it understates revenue (fees and refunds are netted out), hides your fees, puts sales in the wrong month (payouts lag the orders) and makes the books impossible to reconcile.

The right way

1. Book each order as revenue when it happens, with discounts, shipping and sales tax on their own lines.
2. Book each fee, refund and chargeback as it really was, to its own account.
3. Track your Shopify Payments balance as an account of its own (a “clearing” account).
4. When a payout arrives, match it to the bank deposit: it moves money from the clearing account to the bank, and it is never revenue.

Done this way, revenue is right, fees are visible, and the clearing account ties to your Shopify Payments balance, which proves nothing is missing.

Payouts in another currency

If you sell in USD and your payouts land in CAD (or the reverse), the conversion happens inside Shopify Payments. The difference between the order-date rate and the payout amount is a real cost or gain, and it belongs in the books too.