Shopify payout doesn't match your bank deposit? 6 reasons why

Your Shopify orders say one number, your bank deposit says another, and the two rarely line up on the same day or the same amount. That's not a bug — Shopify Payments settles on its own schedule and bundles several things into each payout. Here are the six reasons the deposit differs from your sales, and how to trace each one.

1. Processing fees are netted out

Shopify Payments deducts its per-transaction fee before paying you. Your payout is net of fees, so it will always be smaller than gross sales by the fee total. In the payout transactions export, each charge has an Amount, a Fee, and a Net — the Net is what actually rolls into the payout.

2. Payout timing vs order timing

Shopify pays on a rolling delay (commonly a few business days after the sale). So a payout on Friday covers orders from earlier in the week, not that day's sales. If you compare "today's orders" to "today's deposit," they will never match — you're comparing two different sets of transactions.

3. Refunds inside the payout

Refunds are deducted from the payout that covers the period they were issued in. A big refund can make a payout surprisingly small, or even net a payout to near zero, without anything being wrong.

4. Chargebacks and disputes

A disputed charge is withheld (and sometimes a dispute fee applied) until it resolves. This money leaves your payout when the dispute opens and may return later if you win — another cross-period movement that breaks a naive same-day comparison.

5. Reserves

For some accounts Shopify holds a percentage in reserve against future refunds and chargebacks, releasing it later. Like Amazon's reserves, this shifts money between periods and is a common reason a single payout looks light.

6. Adjustments and multi-currency

Currency conversion, rounding, and miscellaneous adjustments each nudge the number. Individually tiny, collectively enough to stop a spreadsheet from balancing to the cent.

How to reconcile it

1. Export the payout — either the transactions detail or the payouts summary.
2. For the detail export, sum the Net column; that's the payout.
3. Separate charges, refunds, fees, and reserve movements so you can see each force.
4. Match the payout total to the matching bank deposit (by payout date, not order date).

The golden rule: reconcile payout-to-bank, not orders-to-bank. Orders and deposits live on different clocks; the payout is the bridge between them.

Sumhound reads both the Shopify payout transactions and payouts summary exports and rebuilds the deposit from the parts, so you can see exactly which of the six forces moved your number — and confirm the bank got what it should have.