Getting your payment processor reports
Why the bank deposit isn't enough, and how to export reports from Stripe, Square, MX Merchant, Sola, and Venmo.
Getting your payment processor reports
If you take card or online payments, the money that lands in your bank account doesn't tell the whole story. To book your revenue accurately, we need the report from your payment processor itself — not just the deposit. Here's why, and how to get it to us.
The deposit from Stripe, Square, or any processor is the net amount — your sales minus their fees. We need the processor's own report so we can record your full revenue and capture the fees as a deductible expense.
Why the bank deposit understates your revenue
When a customer pays you $100 through a processor, you don't receive $100 in your bank — you receive that amount minus the processor's fee (and minus any refunds for the period). If we only counted the deposit, your revenue would look smaller than it really is, and you'd miss a legitimate, deductible business expense in the process.
So we record both sides: the full gross sales as revenue, and the processing fees as an expense. The bank deposit alone can't show us both — only the processor's report can.
Exporting your report
Every processor has its own dashboard, but the pattern is almost always the same: log in, find the reporting or activity area, choose the date range that matches the period we asked about, and export. A CSV or a summary report covering gross sales, fees, and refunds is what we're after.
- Stripe — look under reporting/payments for a payouts or balance summary you can export for a date range.
- Square — look for sales or transactions reports you can export to CSV.
- MX Merchant — look for the reporting/statements area and export activity for the period.
- Sola — look for the reporting or payouts section and export the period's activity.
- Venmo — Venmo doesn't produce a traditional report, so download the CSV statement for the date range instead.
Export the report for the same window we're catching up — and if we're covering several months, grab the whole range in one export where you can. A report that only covers recent activity leaves gaps for the earlier months.
When your processor lives inside another app
Sometimes the processor is built into a larger platform — a booking system, an online store, or a point-of-sale app. In that case, the report you need usually lives inside that platform's reporting area rather than a standalone processor dashboard. If you're not sure where to look, tell your bookkeeper which app you use to take payments and we'll point you to the right report.
Read-only access vs. emailing reports
If you'd rather not export and send reports every month, many processors let you add us as a read-only user so we can pull the reports ourselves. That's the lower-effort option for ongoing months. For a one-time catch-up, exporting and uploading the reports is often simplest.