Marketplace Payouts: Book Each Settlement

Book a marketplace settlement report and move the payout to the bank

Steps 2 and 3 of reconciling marketplace payouts: book each settlement report so the marketplace cashbook moves by exactly the report’s net payout, then move each payout to the bank. It follows Step 1, where you set up the clearing cashbook and its four accounts. The running example is GadgetSphere Online’s Shopee shop and one RM 2,000.00 order (Meet GadgetSphere Online). Two things first: if a Shopee or Lazada payout job is scheduled for the shop, have it set to INACTIVE before you book the first settlement this way, or the money is counted twice (Step 3); and when the shop opens, compare one order’s invoice with the settlement report and write down which vouchers the invoice already includes (Three things to know first).

What BigLedger records when a payout arrives: read this first, because it decides whether a job is already booking your payouts.
Step 2: when a settlement report arrives, book three documents.
Step 3: when the transfer reaches the bank, move it out of the marketplace cashbook.

What BigLedger records when a payout arrives

This depends on the marketplace, and on whether the payout job is scheduled for your shop at all. Look for it in the Scheduler applet’s job picker, or ask support.

Marketplace	What the product does with a payout
Shopee	The payout job creates one Receipt Voucher per payout, for the net amount, as a single line, and finalises it. The paying party is an entity record for the shop. The money goes to the cashbook named in the job’s own schedule settings, and the other side credits receivables (Step 3). The breakdown is stored inside the voucher, but no column or report shows it. It is not matched to any invoice, so the invoices it pays stay open.
TikTok Shop	The product contains a matcher that would find each order’s invoice and settle it for the smaller of the payout and the amount still open. That leaves the platform’s deductions open on the invoice for you to clear. It is not available to schedule today, so TikTok payouts are recorded by hand.
Lazada	Two receipt jobs. The older one is marked for retirement in the code. The newer pair writes one receipt voucher per order, in ringgit, made out to the customer ticked as Default Entity on the marketplace branch, with a line for each amount on the platform’s transaction statement under the platform’s own fee names. Like Shopee’s, it is not matched to any invoice. Neither job pulls anything until its schedule carries a pull interval. Every Lazada receipt stays a draft. The job asks for each one to be finalised, the request is refused, and nothing reports the refusal: a known defect BigLedger is tracking. So the receipt posts nothing to the ledger or the cashbook, and the payout is in neither until someone acts. The accounts clerk lists the marketplace branch’s receipt vouchers whose Posting Status is still DRAFT and hands the list to your accountant, who decides whether to book those payouts as in Step 2 and discard the drafts, or keep them. What a draft would post if someone finalised it by hand is not established, so ask BigLedger before anyone does. If you use the clearing cashbook, stop the job as in Step 3 all the same.
Shopify, your own storefront	No payout job. On your own storefront, each gateway payment is written onto its sales order as a settlement line, which the cashbook posting job, where it runs, posts to the cashbook; no receipt voucher is made (Core Concepts §4). The gateway’s fee is not posted.

So wherever a job runs, it records that money arrived. It does not record what the money paid, or what was taken before it was paid. Each job writes a receipt once: when it finds one already in the branch for the same payout (Shopee) or order (Lazada), it skips it, so a figure the platform revises afterwards is never written back. The reconciliation is a person’s job on every channel.

Step 2: When a settlement report arrives, book three documents

Receipt Voucher, Purchase Invoice and Payment Voucher. Once per settlement report.

Download the settlement report from the seller centre. It lists the orders being paid and every deduction. For GadgetSphere’s example order:

Receipt Voucher, at the gross amount, into the Shopee cashbook, contra-linked to the invoices the report pays. This clears each invoice in full: RM 2,000.00 moves from receivable to CLEAR-MKT-SHOPEE. For a weekly report of 312 orders, this is one voucher contra-linked to all 312 invoices, not 312 vouchers. That only works if the shop bills one customer. On a Shopee or Lazada shop, that means ticking Default Entity on the marketplace branch (see Running an Online Channel, Step 7). A receipt voucher is made out to one customer, so with a customer per buyer you need one voucher per buyer. A TikTok Shop has no such choice: every TikTok order is billed to a customer record for its buyer, so the accounts clerk books one gross receipt per buyer on the report, into the TikTok cashbook. The check is the same: every invoice the report lists is closed, and the cashbook’s movement equals the report’s net payout.
Purchase Invoice from Shopee as supplier for the deductions: RM 162.00 to EXPENSE-MKT-COMMISSION (the commission of RM 120.00 plus the transaction fee of RM 42.00), and RM 8.00 to EXPENSE-MKT-SHIPPING.
Payment Voucher from the Shopee cashbook paying that purchase invoice: RM 170.00 leaves CLEAR-MKT-SHOPEE.

The Shopee cashbook now holds RM 1,830.00, which is exactly what Shopee is about to transfer.

Who: the accounts clerk. Within two working days of the report, so the month’s figure is never more than one cycle behind.
How you know it is right: the cashbook’s movement for the report equals the report’s own net payout, to the sen.

Step 3: When the transfer reaches the bank, move it out of the marketplace cashbook

Cashbook applet, Cash Transfer. Once per transfer.

Record a Cash Transfer of RM 1,830.00 from Shopee (held by platform) to your primary bank cashbook, dated the day the money arrived. The Shopee cashbook goes back to what Shopee still owes, and the bank line is ready for Bank Reconciliation.

If the Shopee payout job is scheduled for your shop, stop it before you use this method. Its receipt cannot stand in for the Cash Transfer, and the two together count the money twice. The job books each payout as a receipt voucher with two sides:

The money side goes to whichever cashbook the job’s own account setting points at. That setting is on the schedule’s Json tab in the Scheduler applet, not on the marketplace branch.
The other side is a credit to receivables, on the receivable account your company’s defaults give the payout party’s customer type. For an ordinary trade customer that is the company’s default debtor account. The payout party is a record for the shop itself (or, when Shopee’s payout names a customer, a customer record for that id), not the buyers your invoices are made out to. No setting on the job changes this account. Changing the company default would move every customer of that type with it.

So on GadgetSphere’s RM 1,830.00 payout, with the job’s money side pointed at the primary bank, the bank is right, but CLEAR-MKT-SHOPEE still holds RM 1,830.00 and receivables carry a credit of RM 1,830.00 that matches no invoice. Pointing the job at the Shopee cashbook instead only puts the same money into the clearing account a second time.

Who: whoever administers the Scheduler sets the shop’s Shopee payout schedule to INACTIVE (only ACTIVE schedules run), at the same time as Step 1 and before the first settlement you book this way. The accounts clerk then records every transfer by hand, as above.
How you know it is right: the Scheduler shows no ACTIVE Shopee payout schedule for the shop, and after that date the shop’s branch has no receipt voucher made out to the shop’s own record. To see the credit side for yourself, open one of the job’s earlier receipt vouchers in Ledger and Journal: it credits a receivable account, not CLEAR-MKT-SHOPEE.
If the job has already run for payouts you also booked through the clearing cashbook, each one has left both balances above. Do not key Cash Transfers for them. List the job’s receipt vouchers with their dates and amounts and give the list to your accountant, who decides how to correct them.

Two ways to book it, and what each costs

The procedure above is not the only defensible one, and your accountant may prefer the other.

Neither way uses the Shopee payout job’s receipt unchanged. The clearing cashbook works once the job is stopped (Step 3). The net-receipt way can take the job’s receipt as its receipt, but that receipt is made out to the shop’s own record and matched to no invoice, so the invoices it paid stay open and the fee journal alone does not close them. Which way GadgetSphere should take is a choice for your accountant. This page does not choose between them.

	Clearing cashbook (Steps 1 to 3)	Net receipt and a fee journal
How	Gross receipt into a marketplace cashbook; the fees as a supplier invoice; the transfer out	The payout received straight into the bank against the invoices; the gap written off to fee expense with a journal
Fees visible by type and channel	Yes	Only if the journal is split by type, every time
A number for “what the platform owes me”	Yes: the cashbook balance	No. It is spread across open invoices
Refunds after payout	A visible reduction in the cashbook (Step 5)	Easily lost in the next net figure
Work per report	Three documents	One receipt and one journal

The comparison of channels on Running an Online Channel needs the fees by type. Only the first way gives you that without extra effort.

What has to be right first, and what this reaches

The payout is the last link in a chain. These are the links on either side of it.

Before you can reconcile a shop, its orders must be invoiced. An order arrives as a sales order, and no registered job raises the invoice for you. When the invoice is finalised, each line credits the sales account linked to its item for that company, or the company’s default sales account when the item has none, and the customer’s side goes to receivables. So a shop’s revenue lands where its items point: an order line mapped to the wrong item is in the wrong sales account long before any payout arrives. The cashbook and settlement method of Step 1 come first too.
Receivables. Every marketplace invoice stays an open debtor balance until the gross receipt in Step 2 knocks it off. Skip the contra lines and the money is safely in the bank while the debtor balance grows every week.
Bank reconciliation. Only the Cash Transfer in Step 3 reaches the bank cashbook, so the bank’s one credit per transfer has one line to match in Bank Reconciliation. This is the page to work alongside the bank reconciliation for the same bank, in the same sitting.
SST. Output tax on your invoices posts from the invoice, at the price the channel reported. If the platform charges tax on its fees, key it as tax on the Step 2 purchase invoice, where it posts to the company’s input-tax account; how it is treated is your tax adviser’s call.
E-invoice. Each marketplace invoice is your sale to report to LHDN, on its own or in a consolidated e-invoice, as your e-invoice set-up decides. The platform’s fee invoice is the platform’s e-invoice to you, not yours to submit, unless you mark it self-billed (E-Invoice related applets).
The till and your own storefront, the siblings. At a till, a card settlement method’s charge rate posts the acquirer’s fee by itself (Banking the Day’s Takings). That works because an acquirer charges one rate. A marketplace’s deductions change with each order’s category, campaign and shipping, so use the Step 2 purchase invoice rather than a rate. A storefront checkout makes no receipt voucher at all (the table above).
What one mistake reaches. One wrong expense account on one marketplace’s fee invoices repeats in every report of the month, because each week’s invoice is keyed like the last. Step 4 does not catch it: the clearing cashbook proves the amounts, not where they were posted. Only the profit and loss by branch shows it (checks 4 and 5 of the success check), and the accountant decides the correcting journal.

What success looks like for this part

For every settlement report in the month, the receipt, the purchase invoice and the payment voucher are booked and the marketplace cashbook’s movement equals the report’s net payout, to the sen; every transfer received has a Cash Transfer out of the marketplace cashbook; and no payout job you stopped (Shopee or Lazada) is ACTIVE, with no receipt voucher made out to the shop’s own record since. These are checks 2 and 3 of the whole task’s success check; the common mistakes are on the front page.

Common mistakes in this part

The task’s common mistakes are one table on the front page. For these steps, read first the rows on treating the net payout as the sale, leaving the Shopee payout job running under the clearing method, and receiving the gross amount straight into the bank.

Next: Steps 4 and 5, prove the balance at month end and follow refunds.