Shopify paid out. Link My Books posted a summary. QuickBooks banked a deposit. When those three stop agreeing, the difference hides in a clearing account and surfaces at year end. This finds it on the first of the month instead, payout by payout, with the dollar effect on the books and the fix written out.
Thirteen checks run over every payout. Each one comes back with the amount it puts wrong in the books and what to do about it.
| Problem | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Payout never posted | Shopify paid out and Link My Books sent nothing. Sales, tax and fees are all missing from the ledger. |
| Posted but never banked | The entry is in QuickBooks, the deposit is not. It sits in the clearing account looking like income in transit. |
| Deposit with nothing behind it | Cash landed and was coded to sales. Usually an owner transfer or a loan, and it inflates revenue until someone traces it. |
| Posted twice | A re-sync created a second entry. Revenue, sales tax and fees are all double counted. |
| Banked twice | The same deposit keyed in manually on top of the bank feed. |
| Net ties, breakdown does not | The bank reconciles perfectly, so nothing looks wrong, but sales tax was mapped to sales. This one survives for months. |
| Fees at the wrong amount | App charges and shipping labels netted into the payout but not into the fee account. |
| Cut-off | The payout belongs to one month and the cash cleared in the next. Correct, but it has to be shown as in transit. |
| Failed sync | The Link My Books entry errored on a missing tax code and nobody noticed. |
| Cent-level rounding | Separated out so it never gets confused with a real difference. |
Shopify payouts, the Link My Books settlement list, and the QuickBooks transaction list for the account the payouts land in. CSV or Excel. Columns are detected and shown back to you before anything is matched.
Gross sales down to cash in the bank, then the two variances explained line by line. One page a client can actually follow.
Worst first. Mark each one fixed or no action needed, leave a note, then export the lot as an Excel workpaper for the file.
Nowhere. Files are read in the browser and held in memory. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account and there is no server holding client books. Close the tab and it is gone. Only your own notes and the light or dark setting are kept, in this browser.