How online sellers can make sense of payouts, deductions, and the money still sitting with the platform.
R74 450 lands in your business account. You check the amount, enter it under sales and get back to packing orders.
Another job done.
Except that one neat entry might have swallowed R16 500 in selling costs, hidden a chargeback and quietly erased R5 000 that the marketplace still owes you. The bank balance? Perfectly correct. That’s what makes this mistake so easy to miss.
When you’re running a small online store, the payout is the number waving at you. It arrives every week or fortnight, depending on the platform, and it looks reasonably enough like the money you’ve earned.
But a marketplace or payment gateway does quite a bit of arithmetic before paying you. Refunds come off. So do commissions, fulfilment charges, listing fees and chargebacks. Sometimes the platform holds back a reserve as well, just in case.
You get what’s left.
What’s Really Hiding In Your Sales Data
Call that remainder “sales” and revenue, expenses and cash get bundled into one figure. Convenient, yes. Useful when you’re trying to work out whether the shop is making money? Less so.
Let’s put some actual rands to it.
Suppose your store takes R100 000 in orders through a marketplace over a fortnight. During that period, customers return R3 200 worth of goods. The platform deducts R12 000 in commission, another R4 500 for fulfilment and listings, and an R850 chargeback after a card payment is reversed. It also holds R5 000 in reserve against future refunds.
Here’s where the money went:
Item Amount
Customer orders: R100 000
Minus refunds: – R3 200
Minus commission: – R12 000
Minus fulfilment and listing fees: – R4 500
Minus chargeback: – R850
Minus reserve held: -R5 000
Equals the amount paid into your bank account: R74 450
Nothing has vanished. You can account for every rand.
The trouble starts when the last line becomes the only line in your books.
Before separating any VAT, orders with fewer refunds come to R96 800. Recording R74 450 as sales leaves a gap of R22 350 against that amount, even before considering how to treat the chargeback.
Meanwhile, the R16 500 spent on commission and fees disappears from your expense records. You paid it, all right, but try finding it later when you want to know what that marketplace costs you.
The R850 chargeback gets buried too. One reversed payment might not worry you. But what about several reversed payments, month after month? You’d want to know.
And that R5 000 reserve is still sitting somewhere. The platform owes it to your business, subject to anything it later uses for refunds or chargebacks. It hasn’t reached your bank account, but that doesn’t mean that it’s money you can forget about.
With all of this folded into the payout, judging the channel’s profitability becomes a bit of a thumbsuck. You can’t clearly compare revenue with selling costs or see what’s left after those costs and the cost of your stock.
Yet the bank reconciliation can still balance. Nicely, even.
Why A Payout Report Matters
The document that helps untangle this is the settlement report, sometimes called a payout report. Download it. It explains how the platform arrived at the amount it sent you, and it gives you a starting point for tracing that payment back to the underlying orders.
For each payout, record the pieces separately:
- Gross sales: the order amounts included in the settlement, before platform deductions. If you’re VAT registered, separate any output VAT from sales.
- Refunds: reductions in sales, with the appropriate VAT adjustment where applicable.
- Commission and fees: selling expenses, separating any deductible input VAT.
- Chargebacks: a distinct entry, treated as a sales reversal or loss according to what happened. Keep them visible.
- Reserves held or released: movements in the balance owed to you by the platform.
Those entries, including their VAT components, should explain the bank deposit exactly. If they don’t, there’s a difference to investigate.
Do it while the orders are still familiar. “I’ll sort it out at year-end” sounds harmless in the moment; six months later, an unexplained adjustment on an old payout report is nobody’s idea of a good afternoon.
There’s a VAT wrinkle here, too.
For a registered vendor, output VAT on a standard-rated sale is based on the sale before the platform deducts its charges. The platform’s commission doesn’t shrink the value of what you sold to the customer. South Africa’s standard VAT rate is 15%, so the VAT portion of a standard-rated, VAT-inclusive amount is calculated as 15/115 of that amount. That portion belongs in output VAT, rather than sales revenue. You can read how SARS explains the VAT framework and current rate on their website.
Refunds need the corresponding VAT treatment. Platform fees need a separate look, because you shouldn’t assume every deduction includes VAT.
Where VAT has been charged on eligible costs incurred in making taxable supplies, a registered vendor can generally deduct it as input tax, subject to the relevant requirements. Keep the valid tax invoice. A settlement report explains a payout, but it isn’t automatically a valid tax invoice just because it contains a fee breakdown. SARS sets out the tax invoice requirements here.
Back to our example: if the entire R16 500 in commission and fees includes VAT at 15%, roughly R2 152 of that amount is VAT.
That’s worth getting right.
Action Steps for E-commerce Traders About Sales Data
Check the platform’s fee invoice to see what VAT it actually charged, and retain the invoice to support any deduction. If the fee never makes it into your books in the first place, its VAT is easy to overlook as well.
Not VAT registered? The full fee, including any VAT, is your cost. You can’t claim that VAT back.
Then there’s the registration question, which can creep up on sellers who watch their payouts instead of their sales.
SARS is applying a compulsory VAT registration threshold of R2,3 million from 1 April 2026, up from R1 million. The voluntary threshold increased from R50 000 to R120 000. The registration rules concern taxable supplies over the relevant 12-month period, with additional rules covering expected supplies; they don’t use the cash left after a marketplace has taken its deductions.
In our fortnightly example, the difference between customer orders and the bank payout is R25 550. That difference isn’t all lost revenue: it includes fees, refunds, a chargeback and money held in reserve. But it shows how far apart the two numbers can be.
Let that sort of gap repeat across the year, and a seller looking only at bank deposits could think there’s plenty of room below the registration threshold. The underlying sales records may tell another story.
So keep gross sales visible, then use the proper taxable-supplies figure when checking whether registration is required. Don’t ask the bank statement to do that job. It simply doesn’t have the detail.
As for the routine itself, you can start with the tools you already have.
When a payout arrives, save the settlement report with your accounting records. Record its components and match them to the deposit. Keep a running balance of reserves held and released, so you can see what the platform still owes you and follow up when a release doesn’t arrive.
Once a month, compare your store’s own sales report with the orders covered by the settlement reports. Allow for cancellations and timing differences: an order placed near month end may appear in the following month’s payout. Explain those differences rather than forcing the totals to agree.
Selling through more than one platform? Do the same for each one. A busy channel can look impressive on the orders screen while taking a sizeable bite through fees. Separate records let you judge its revenue, costs and margin on their own merits.
None of this means an owner who books the payout as sales is careless. You’ve got parcels to send, customers asking where their orders are, and a bank feed offering one tidy number. Of course it’s tempting.
But before you use that number to set prices, compare marketplaces or decide how well the business is doing, open the settlement report.
Start with the next payout. Find the orders behind it, account for the deductions, and keep an eye on what’s still owed to you. Then that R74 450 will mean something beyond “money came in”.
How online sellers can make sense of payouts, deductions, and the money still sitting with the platform. R74 450 lands in your business account. You… Read More
