Your dashboard, your bank, and your books disagree every month. Here is why payouts never match sales — and the reconciliation habit that fixes it.
If you sell on Shopify, Amazon, or Etsy, you have lived this mystery: your dashboard says one number, your bank says another, and your books say a third. None of them are wrong. They are just measuring different things — and until you reconcile them properly, you cannot trust any of them.
Why payouts never match sales
Marketplaces and platforms deduct fees, refunds, shipping adjustments, sales tax collected, and reserves before money reaches your bank. A $10,000 sales week can easily land as a $8,400 payout. If your books record the $10,000 as income and the $8,400 as a separate deposit, you have double-counted revenue and lost every fee in between.
The reconciliation habit that fixes it
Record the full sale, then record every deduction as its own expense line: platform fees, payment processing, refunds, shipping labels, tax collected. Then match each payout, line by line, to the bank deposit. Automation tools built for e-commerce can pull this data per channel so nothing is keyed by hand.
What clean looks like
When reconciliation is done right, three numbers agree every month: channel sales minus channel deductions equals the bank deposit, and your books show all three legs. That is the moment your profit margin stops being a guess.
At LedgerLogic we reconcile every sales channel separately, so you can see exactly which channel earns its keep — and which one only looks like it does.
