Notes · 25 September 2026
Where €285,611 went between sales and payouts.
A Shopify shop sold EUR 529,976 of orders in March. Its Shopify Payments account shows EUR 244,365 net for March card transactions. The question every owner asks sooner or later: where did the other EUR 285,611 go, and is any of it money that should have arrived and did not?
The data here are synthetic, in the real layouts of the Shopify orders export and the Shopify Payments transactions export. The two files were compared and nothing else.
Most of the gap is not missing money
The first step is to take out what never passes through this account at all:
- paid through PayPal: EUR 128,380.60;
- paid through Klarna: EUR 99,928.80;
- paid manually, by bank transfer or invoice: EUR 18,150.35;
- paid in cash at the till: EUR 15,710.00.
That is EUR 262,170, half of March. Its money reaches the bank by other routes, each with its own file. What is left, EUR 267,806.05 of card orders, is what the payouts file should explain.
The card part, record by record
Every card order was matched to its charge by order number, under rules written down before counting: which orders should have a card payment, what must match, what to leave out. 1,439 of 1,444 card orders match their charge to the cent. Eight records need a person:
- two orders marked paid with no charge behind them (EUR 376.80);
- two orders charged less than their total;
- two charges with no order in the export;
- one customer charged twice: the second charge was refunded, its fee was not;
- one refund EUR 4.95 larger than the order says.
Separately, the payouts file has a chargeback on an order that still reads paid in Shopify: the card network took back EUR 154.00 and a EUR 15.00 fee, and the shop's books do not show it.
From the charges to the net
From the charges, the table subtracts refunds of March orders, refunds made in March on orders paid in February, the refund of the double charge, the chargeback, one adjustment and EUR 4,624.84 of card fees. It ends at EUR 244,364.70 net for March transactions, of which EUR 228,421.57 was paid out by 31 March and EUR 15,943.13 in the first days of April. Every line of the table is a sum of rows of one of the two files.
What stays open, and why
78 March orders carry a refund in Shopify with no refund transaction in March. Most were almost certainly refunded in April. But the orders export has no refund date, so from these two files an April refund cannot be told from a refund made outside Shopify Payments, such as a gift card or cash at the till. The April transactions file closes the question. Until then, they are listed, not guessed.