If you are using a card payment service on your website such as Stripe, Payment Express, Paypal, eWay, Laybuy or ZipPay it is likely that you’ll receive a lump sum deposit from your payment provider in your bank account less any fees that they have already deducted. Rocketspark’s ecommerce system connects nicely with Xero and generates the invoices in Xero for online sales made through the website. However, as the fees have already been deducted it's not possible to perfectly match funds received against invoices.
Reconcile Payments
If you have an accountant or bookkeeper you’d want to chat to them about potential options but here is one approach to consider to help reconcile these payments:
- Create a dummy bank account called, for example, Stripe Card Payments
- As the lump sum is deposited from Stripe or your payment provider you can reconcile the transaction as a transfer to accounts.
- Go to your sales invoices in Xero not yet marked as paid, select with the checkboxes a batch of invoices that you know you’ve received the funds for and click the "Deposit" button.
- Set the payment date as the date of the last payment in the batch.
Make sure that any invoices to be marked as paid don’t straddle important financial dates such as a GST or VAT period or the end of a financial year especially if you pay your sales tax on a payments basis as the Payment date you set will determine the period in which the payment is recognised for tax purposes.
- Go to the dummy bank account from your Xero dashboard and view the transactions. We recommend clicking on the "Status" column heading to sort by status and have all of the unreconciled transactions at the top. Click the check box beside any unreconciled transactions that relate to your bulk deposit or account transfer, click the "More" button and choose "Mark as reconciled".
- Now create a spend money transaction for any fees that have already been deducted and manually reconcile that transaction. You might choose to do this on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis but just make sure it’s up to date so that all business expenses are accounted for before doing any tax-related filings with your countries tax department.
Please note that the statement balance and the balance in Xero won’t typically match as the Xero balance will include invoices for sales that have been made but for which funds have not yet been deposited as there can be 1 or more days delay in receiving funds from the payment provider. At year end your account balance in Xero should reflect the payments that have been successfully made but not yet paid to you.