How to book your payouts

This is the monthly routine, for whoever keeps your books. It is the same whether you are paid a share of someone else’s orders or you sell direct.

Do it once a month and it takes minutes. The documents are already generated.

The one thing to get right first

The invoice is the revenue. The payout is the cash. They are two different things, on two different dates, and they do not have to fall in the same month.

An invoice is raised when the payout is approved. The money leaves on the next daily run, and reaches the bank in normal transfer time.

So the invoice date and the bank date can land on different sides of a month end. That is the case to watch.

Book the revenue from the invoice. Book the bank line against the payout. Everything below follows from that.

Why this is less work than invoicing

This is what you stop doing, and the routine below rests on it.

Before	Now
Raise an invoice per job, or receive and check one	The offer you already priced becomes the invoice, so nothing is keyed twice
Send it, then wait for the customer to go and pay it	The customer pays inside the order, with a method they already use
Chase what has not been paid	The customer usually pays before the work starts, and the money is held until the job is done
Work out which invoices one transfer covers, and why it is short	The payout ties to its statement, which lists every order inside it
Watch for a job being invoiced twice	The share invoice is generated for you, and installers are told not to send their own
Wait for the invoice, then wait out 30-day terms	The invoice is issued and the money released on the same approval
Assemble the month yourself	One statement, one invoice ZIP, one CSV, per month

Your accounting software already matches bank lines for you. What changes is how much there is to match, and how often a figure does not tie.

The job, the price, the payment and the invoice are one record, in the tool you already work in. You still close at month end, with the documents already made.

What you book, by role

You are	Revenue from	Cash from	Also
Installer	The share invoices raised in your name	Payouts to your bank	No fee to book. The merchant carries it
Merchant	The customer invoices	Payouts to your bank, your part of each	The monthly transaction fee invoice, and share invoices you receive

The monthly routine

Do this on the day you close, not later. One step depends on it.

1. Open Wallet → Payout overview and find the month.
2. Take Monthly Statement (PDF) and Monthly Statement (CSV) from the month header.
3. Take Monthly invoices (ZIP). That is every invoice for the month in one file.
4. If you are the merchant, take the Transaction Fee Invoice as well.
5. Run the work-in-progress export from Wallet → Offers. Set Paid to on or before the last day of the month. Set Payment status to Paid. Set Payout status to Pending approval, then again to Pending payout, and Download CSV each time.
6. Reconcile the bank, below.

Step 5 is the one that cannot wait. Payout status is the status now, not the status on the date you filtered by. A payout that lands in the meantime drops out of the result.

Tying it to the bank

Every payout carries a reference, and that reference is on your bank statement. It is the join.

Take	Match to
The bank line	The payout Reference
The payout total	The sum of NetPayoutContributionIncVat in the statement CSV
Each CSV row	Its InvoiceNumber, and the PDF in the invoices ZIP

Sum one column, not across a row. See Export payment data to a spreadsheet.

Working in Excel

The CSV opens straight into Excel with characters like æ, ø and å intact.

Two things catch people out:

• Amounts use a full stop as the decimal separator. If your Excel expects a comma, open the file through Data → From Text/CSV and set the separator there rather than double-clicking.
• The two exports use different date formats. Statements use d/m/yyyy, the offers export uses yyyy-mm-dd.

Set these once

Setting	Where	Set it to
Payout statement CSV format	Settings → Payments	Default. The full CSV is then attached to every statement email, so nobody has to log in. The simplified layout carries no VAT column.
Billing email	Settings → Company	Whoever keeps your books, not a personal inbox. Statements go there automatically when a payout books.
Payout grouping	Settings → Payments	Order for one payout per offer, which is easiest to match line by line. Aggregated for fewer bank entries.

Three things to remember

• Keep your own copies. The documents stay available in the app, but your duty to keep records is yours. Store the monthly ZIP and CSV where you store the rest of your books.
• Register the INST- series separately. Invoices raised for you come from a sequence Installer.com keeps. Never issue from it in your own system. See Download invoices and credit notes.
• Do not pay the transaction fee invoice. The fee already came out of the payment, so the invoice is issued settled. It is a receipt.

When the month is not there

A month appears once the bank has booked a payout in it. A payout still processing has no month yet, so it sits under Pending.

A failed payout does not hold the month, because it never reached one. It sits in Pending until it goes through.