What Is a Shopify Payout? A Plain-English Guide
Shopify sends you money every few days — but what exactly is in that deposit? Here's a simple breakdown of what makes up your payout.
Every few days, Shopify sends you money. It shows up in your bank account, and it's almost never a round number. If you've ever stared at that deposit wondering "where did this come from?", you're not alone.
A payout is not the same as your sales
Your Shopify payout is the net amount after Shopify has already subtracted several things from your gross sales. Here's the formula:
Gross sales − Refunds − Shopify fees − Disputes = Your payout
So if you sold $5,000 this week, had $200 in refunds, and paid roughly $160 in payment processing fees, your payout might be around $4,640 — not $5,000.
Why does the timing feel off?
By default, Shopify sends payouts every two business days. That means sales from Monday might arrive in your bank on Wednesday. Sales from multiple days get bundled into one deposit. This is why a single payout can represent sales from several different days.
What's inside every payout?
- Gross sales — the total your customers paid, including any tips or shipping you collected
- Refunds — any money returned to customers during that period
- Payment processing fees — roughly 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction (varies by your Shopify plan)
- Disputes — if a customer filed a chargeback that was decided against you, that gets deducted too
- Adjustments — rare, but Shopify occasionally makes corrections to past payouts
Why this matters for your books
If you just record the deposit amount as "revenue," your books are wrong. You're understating your actual sales and hiding your fees. That makes your profit margins look different than they really are, and it causes headaches at tax time.
The right way to record a payout is to capture the gross sales separately from the fees and refunds, so your income statement tells the true story of your business.
How PaydayBooks handles this automatically
PaydayBooks reads every payout from Shopify and creates three entries in QuickBooks for you:
- A SalesReceipt for your gross sales
- A RefundReceipt for any refunds in that period (skipped if there were none)
- A Deposit for the exact net amount that hit your bank
This happens automatically, every 6 hours, with no action required from you. Your books stay accurate without you having to touch a spreadsheet.