Pre-dawn shophouse accounting desk with an open laptop edge and a folded paper slip under a warm lamp

Reconciliation · Singapore e-commerce

Payout released

How marketplace payouts become ledger entries

Settlement reports are the least-loved documents in online retail and the only ones that matter to your books. Every payout is settled before it is spent — this page walks through the conversion, step by step.

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Retained across every channel type 100% of the payout trails posted — the gross figure, every platform fee, refund and hold, kept as one ruled account on one sheet.

Settlement

What a settlement report contains

Five lines, posted in this order. Gross sales less deductions equals the payout.

01 Gross sales — the sale before any deduction Revenue Released
02 Platform commission — the marketplace's share of the sale Cost of earning Released
03 Payment processing fees — charged by the gateway on the transaction Cost of earning Released
04 Shipping label costs — courier charge billed back by the platform Cost of fulfilling Released
05 Refunds, chargebacks and held funds — money the platform keeps back Adjustment · hold Held

Platforms such as Shopee, Lazada, Amazon and Etsy each present this differently, but the underlying move is identical. Before anything gets posted, confirm which of those lines is revenue and which is a cost of earning that revenue.

Get the classification wrong and the error compounds monthly — a fee posted as an expense twice, or a refund logged as revenue, is a difference that only shows up when the account is closed.

Posting rules

Posting gross sales correctly

Revenue is the gross sale amount, not the deposit. Post it as revenue on the date the order was fulfilled, matching the sales order. The deduction lines either reduce that revenue — when they are platform commissions or processing fees — or are posted as expenses when they qualify as something else.

In practice we review each new channel's fee list once, define the posting rule, and reuse it each month. That rule sheet is the difference between books that reconcile and a monthly argument with yourself.

Revenue posted

Gross

The sale amount on the fulfilment date, not the bank deposit. This is the figure the sales order matches.

Deductions posted

Net

Commissions and processing fees against revenue; everything else goes to its own expense account with a clear label.

Standard-rated sales

Local sales charged with GST. The gross figure stays revenue; GST is carried separately so the return is not built from guesswork at quarter end.

Zero-rated exports

Goods shipped out of Singapore. The sale is still revenue; the GST treatment follows the export evidence held on file, order by order.

Out of scope

Sales below the registration threshold, or lines a marketplace already handles. These still post as revenue — they simply carry no GST line.

Where payment gateways and buy-now-pay-later fit

Every one is its own channel with its own fee schedule and posting rule.

Marketplace settlement

Gross · commission · payout
BNPL provider

Hold · split · weekly
Card gateway

Fee taken at charge
E-wallet payout

Own payout cycle
Bank feed

Posting · matching

Record the sale at order date, the gateway charge as a cost, and the transfer as the cash leg. This keeps a channel's true margin visible, which is exactly what gets lost when the whole month is posted as one revenue number.

Following refund adjustments and holding periods

A refund can arrive after the payout has already been deposited, meaning it has to be posted in the period it belongs to, not the period the money moved. Marketplaces also routinely hold funds during dispute windows or delivery confirmation, so the deposit you see may be older than the sales it represents.

The same reasoning covers chargebacks and dispute holds: they belong beside the order that caused them, not beside the bank line that carried the deduction.

Bank line

Reconciliation to the bank line

The final step is tying the payout to the amount that landed in the account. Different banks post marketplace deposits with different references and batch them differently, and some aggregate a week of small payouts into one credit. When the numbers do not tie, the difference is investigated and explained before the month closes — nothing is force-balanced.

Traced

Deposit posted with an unfamiliar reference, matched back to its orders.

Split

One bank credit carries several small payouts, split against each.

Reported

A gap survives the investigation — written up so you can chase the platform.

What good reconciliation requires from you

Two hands passing a closed folder across a shophouse table under warm lamplight

Once the rules exist, monthly reconciliation is routine rather than exploratory, and the trail from any deposit back to the underlying orders stays intact — ready for IRAS when the time comes.

Settlement reports

Exportable from the platform or a third-party tool. This is the raw material — without it, reconciliation becomes a guess about what the platform charged.

Bank feed access

An accessible feed lets the deposit be matched against the sales it represents, rather than against the month it happened to arrive in.

One example report

For a new or unusual channel, one sample settlement report is usually enough to build the posting rule. That first month is slower than the ones after it.

If a channel is new to us, one example report is all we need to build the posting rule. Send it across and we will walk your selling channels with you, channel by channel, before anything is committed.

Send a sample settlement report See pricing tiers