A marketplace payout is a net figure containing sales, fees, refunds, adjustments and any amount the channel held back. Reconciling it means breaking that figure into its parts, matching each part to the orders and fees behind it, and tying the total to the deposit that landed in the bank.
The five steps
- Pull the settlement detail for the payout period, not the summary. The summary is what most tools import, and it is where the detail is lost.
- Match sales lines to orders, order by order, including the discount on each one.
- Match fee lines to the orders they were charged against, since fees are charged on the discounted price rather than the list price.
- Account for refunds and adjustments inside the period, which often belong to orders from an earlier period.
- Tie the net total to the bank deposit, and confirm nothing is left unexplained.
Why this is harder than it sounds
The common setup imports a summary journal into the accounting system. The books balance, and the detail stays outside them, so any later question about one channel, one product or one promotion gets answered from a spreadsheet, if it can be answered at all.
Refund timing makes it worse. A refund inside this payout may belong to an order from six weeks ago, which means period totals shift after they were reported unless the link back to the original order is intact.
What good looks like
Every payout traces backward to its orders and fees, and forward to its deposit. Nothing in the chain is a manual adjustment. A question like “what did this channel actually net last week” is a report rather than a project.
Focal reconciles settlements by channel and reconciles channel sales order by order against the storefront, then matches the deposit through the bank feed. Shopify is the channel proven to that standard today. The detail stays attached to the entry rather than being summarized on the way in.
