If you sell on a marketplace, you are not paid per sale. The platform accumulates orders, subtracts its commission, your ad spend, the shipping labels you bought, any refunds you issued and sometimes withheld tax — and then wires one net amount on its own schedule.
That single number is the one your bank feed shows you. It is also the number most bookkeeping tools quietly file as your revenue, and doing so is wrong twice over: it understates what you actually sold, and it loses every fee you could have deducted.
A $494.29 Etsy deposit might be $610 of sales, less $58 in commission, $34 in ads and $24 in shipping labels. Recorded as $494.29 of revenue, you have understated sales by $116 and thrown away $116 of deductible expense. The tax effect is roughly neutral; the picture of your business is not.
Where payouts live: the Revenue section
Synceipt keeps both halves of your incoming money in one place. Choose Revenue in the left sidebar, and you get a toggle between two tabs:
- Invoices — what you have billed customers and they have not yet paid. This is accounts receivable: money you are owed.
- Payouts — what a marketplace has already told you it is sending. This is money in transit: not owed to you, just not arrived.
The two totals are shown separately and are never added together. Outstanding invoices are a receivable; a payout in transit is not. A single combined "money coming in" figure would misstate both, so Synceipt does not offer one.
How a payout gets in
Connect the email account your marketplace notifications arrive in, and Synceipt reads the payout notices the same way it reads purchase receipts. It recognises payouts from Etsy, Amazon, eBay, Walmart Marketplace, Apple, Google Play, Shopify, Stripe and PayPal, and you can record one by hand for any platform it has not seen.
From the notice it takes the platform, the shop, the payout date, the expected arrival date and the net amount. The payout appears as In transit, with its expected arrival. You can open the original email at any time from the payout's detail view, so the figures are always one click from their source.
In transit, then Deposited
A payout has exactly two live states, and both are derived from one fact — whether a bank deposit is linked to it:
- In transit — the platform says the money is coming; no deposit is linked yet. If the expected arrival passes and nothing has landed, the payout is flagged as overdue.
- Deposited — a bank credit is linked, and the money is in your account.
Nothing posts to your books while a payout is in transit. Synceipt works on a cash basis here: the announcement is not income, the arrival is.
Matching the payout to its deposit
When a matching credit arrives in your bank feed, Synceipt suggests it and you confirm. If it suggests nothing — or the wrong one — choose Find the deposit and pick from the ranked candidates yourself. Unlink is always available, and unlinking releases the deposit back to the other matchers.
Three rules govern what can match what, and they exist to stop plausible-looking nonsense:
- The deposit cannot precede the announcement. The search window runs forward from the payout date only — a credit that landed before the platform said it was sending anything is not that payout.
- The currencies must be equal. Synceipt does not convert between currencies, so a EUR payout will not match a USD deposit. It will also refuse to let you edit a linked payout into a different currency.
- Several payouts may share one deposit; one payout may not span two. A platform that consolidates marketplaces into a single wire is normal, and their total simply cannot exceed the credit.
Once linked, the deposit is one click away from the payout, and the transaction itself shows which payout settled it — so "what is this deposit?" has an answer from either direction.
The breakdown, and why Synceipt will not invent one
Most payout emails — Etsy's included — state only the net amount. They do not itemise what was taken out. This is the point where a bookkeeping tool has to make a choice, and it is worth knowing which one Synceipt made.
Synceipt will not estimate your fees. It knows a typical commission rate for each platform and uses it to help match a fee-reduced deposit — but a matching tolerance is not an accounting input, and promoting a guess into your books is the one thing bookkeeping must never do. Filing taxes from an estimated fee figure leaves you worse off than filing from an honest net.
So a payout with no itemisation says so plainly: it tells you the email gave only the deposit amount, and that the sales and fees behind it are not known. It does not fill the gap with arithmetic.
Supplying the real numbers
The answer to a missing breakdown is real data, which your platform's own statement has. Open the payout, choose Add breakdown, and enter the lines from that statement:
| Adds to the deposit | Subtracts from it |
|---|---|
| Gross sales | Platform fees |
| Shipping collected | Processing fees |
| Reserve released | Advertising |
| Shipping labels | |
| Tax withheld | |
| Refunds | |
| Reserve held |
Adjustment is the one line that may go either way. The signs are fixed per type, so you enter amounts and Synceipt handles the direction — there is no sign toggle to get wrong.
If your lines do not add up to the deposit, Synceipt shows you both figures exactly as entered and flags the difference. It does not silently adjust one to match the other, because a mismatch usually means a real line is missing.
Turning the breakdown into revenue and fees
Entering the breakdown records it against the payout. Applying it is a second, deliberate step: choose Record revenue and fees, and Synceipt writes the lines onto the bank transaction as splits. Your reports then count the gross sales as revenue and each fee as the deductible expense it is, instead of treating the net wire as your income.
Applying a breakdown replaces any splits the deposit already has. If you had split that deposit by hand, Synceipt asks before overwriting your work — confirming the match never does this on its own, which is exactly why the two actions are separate.
When the extraction is wrong
If Synceipt reads something that is not a payout, or records the same payout twice, choose Not a payout on the record. It is hidden rather than deleted, any linked deposit is released, and you can restore it later from the Dismissed filter. A payout you entered by hand can be deleted outright — an email-sourced one is dismissed instead, because the next email sync would simply recreate it.
Synceipt also warns rather than silently drops when it sees a possible duplicate: a busy seller genuinely can be paid the same amount twice in one day, and discarding the second would lose real money from the books.
What you need
Payout records are part of Synceipt's bookkeeping features, available on the Pro and Pro Plus plans — the same gate as invoices. Below that gate, payout emails are still correctly recognised as income notices rather than filed as expenses, so your expense totals stay honest on every plan; they simply do not become payout records you can match and itemise.
Downgrading is not destructive. Existing payouts stop being listed and matched, and come back intact if you upgrade again.
Is a marketplace payout income?
The money arriving is. But the deposit is net of fees, so recording the wire as your revenue understates your sales and loses your deductible costs. The gross sales figure is your revenue; the commission, ads, shipping labels and refunds are expenses. That is why Synceipt keeps the breakdown separate from the deposit amount.
Why does my payout show no gross sales?
Because the platform's email did not state any. Synceipt shows "not stated" rather than estimating from a typical fee rate — an estimate in your books is worse than an honest net figure. Add the breakdown from your platform statement to fill it in.
What if one bank deposit covers several payouts?
That is supported. Link each payout to the same deposit; their total cannot exceed the credit. The reverse is not supported — a single payout cannot be split across two deposits.
Why has my payout not matched a deposit that is clearly in my account?
Check the date and the currency. The match window runs forward from the payout date, so a credit dated before the announcement will not be considered, and currencies must be equal because Synceipt does not convert. If both look right, use Find the deposit to link it by hand.
Do payouts count against my AI extraction allowance?
Yes. Reading a payout email is the same AI call as reading a receipt, and it draws on the same monthly allowance from the same pool. There is no separate payout quota.
What is the difference between the Invoices and Payouts tabs?
An invoice is money a customer owes you because you billed them. A payout is money a platform has already sent you from sales it collected on your behalf. Both are revenue, but only invoices are a receivable — which is why their totals are shown separately and never added.
Stop filing net deposits as revenue
Connect the inbox your payout notices land in, and Synceipt will track what each platform is sending, match it to the deposit, and keep the fees where your tax return can find them.