The quarter-end spreadsheet
Your bookkeeper asks for course income by product for the quarter. Your sales happen through Stripe on your website, through PayPal for some buyers, and through your course platform's own checkout for a bundle. There are payment plans in all three, refunds in two, and sales in dollars, euros and pounds.
What arrives in the bank is a set of payouts: lump sums, net of fees, a few days after the sales, sometimes including a refund from a different week. You spend two evenings exporting CSV files and trying to make them add up. They nearly do. The difference is written off as 'fees, probably'.
Why the numbers never quite match
Each provider pays out in its own rhythm and its own format. A payout is not a sale; it is many sales, minus fees, minus refunds, sometimes minus a dispute, converted to your currency at that day's rate. Payment plans mean one sale arrives in several pieces. None of the exports show product names the same way.
- Payouts combine many sales, fees and refunds.
- Currencies are converted with their own fees.
- Payment plan instalments arrive over months.
- Platform checkouts report differently from Stripe and PayPal.
- Product names are inconsistent across providers.
How any of this should be treated for tax, including VAT on digital sales, is for you and your accountant. The problem we solve is getting clean, matched numbers to them.
What messy books cost
Your evenings, first. Then your bookkeeper's or accountant's time, which you pay for. Then decisions: if you cannot see income by product after fees and refunds, you cannot tell which course is really earning. And a set of books with unexplained differences is harder to rely on when something needs checking later.
Reconciliation that does the matching
- Transactions are pulled daily from Stripe, PayPal and your course platform through their APIs.
- Each sale is mapped to a product using a list we build with you, so different names for the same product are joined.
- Fees, refunds, disputes and currency conversions are separated from sales.
- Payment plan instalments are linked to the original sale, so you can see what has been collected and what is still due.
- Each provider's payouts are matched to the transactions they contain and to the deposit in your bank feed.
- Summaries are posted to Xero or QuickBooks as clean entries by product, with fees and refunds on their own lines, in the structure your accountant asks for.
- Anything that does not match is listed for you, with the transactions involved.
| In the payout | Where it goes | Visible to you |
|---|---|---|
| Course sale | Income by product | Yes |
| Provider fee | Fees | Yes |
| Refund | Refunds by product | Yes |
| Currency conversion | Conversion costs | Yes |
| Dispute | Held until resolved | Flagged |
Books that add up
At quarter end, your bookkeeper has clean entries by product, already matched to the bank. You have a dashboard showing what each course earned after fees and refunds, and what payment plans still have to collect. The 'fees, probably' line disappears, and the few genuine mismatches are listed with their transactions.
Payment plans stop being a blur as well. You can see, for each launch, how much has been collected, how much is still due, and which instalments have failed, which matters when you are planning spending for the months ahead.
Launch decisions get easier too. When you can see what your last launch actually brought in after refunds and fees, product by product, deciding whether to run it again, raise the price or drop a bonus becomes a question of numbers rather than feel.
Does quarter end feel like this?
- You sell through more than one payment provider.
- Payouts never quite match sales.
- You export CSV files to build reports for your bookkeeper.
- You cannot see income by product after fees and refunds.
- Payment plan income is hard to track.