I’m curious, those of you who use online payment processors like Stripe, PayPal – when it comes to do your taxes (I did my quarterly filings yesterday), do you massage this data yourself, or do you just throw it all at your accountant?
My experience is that the reports from each platform are:
Wildly different, and
Often really, really hard to decipher.
Without understanding what the reports represent, I’m not sure how a 3rd party – say, your accountant – would have a chance of understanding them.
(Of course they could understand them, with time. And they’d bill you accordingly.)
So I do this myself. I get the reports and I mung them in Excel. It’s really boring and takes about half a day.
ha.
I don’t use such, but I looked around in Stripe’s docs until I finally found something resembling a description of formats you can download. Looking at the Payout Reconciliation report on that page, I can imagine how this would be really confusing to work with.
Even plain bank downloads can be a hassle. You really need to massage them before you can use it, even if just because the fields are in an annoying order and you have to scroll right to find what you need.
And yes, some of us still have banks without any automatic integration
I sense a knowledge base emerging here. Per data source:
scripts for transforming the data
for manual munging: instructions on which columns to copy and paste (I do this often for small batches)
spreadsheet templates where you paste your download in one sheet, and get the transformed data in another.
And beside that, general instructions so people can understand what they need to look for.
Requirement: figure out which of my transactions was made by an Australian. Calculate their GST component (total / 11) as that’s what I owe the ATO.
The typical scenario is that I have an amount paid to me. Call it $123.45. But the various platforms are universally awful at showing you exactly which transactions make up that amount.
Once you’ve got it figured out, it’s usually not that bad. Sometimes you just select cells in Excel and make the sum in the lower toolbar add up. You get there eventually, it’s just tedious. Thinkific, however, is atrocious.
You need their ‘legacy payouts report’, which is hidden behind a small link. I’m terrified that it’ll just disappear one day because it’s the only one with the data I need.
It shows you transactions, but there’s no way to get the country on that list. So then I need to download my users, and VLOOKUP the email address of the transaction against the user to get the country. Now I can figure out the rest.
None of this is hard, if you’re familiar with Excel. It’s just frustrating, and really really boring.
I absolutely think that per-platform guidance, in the form of a run-book, could be useful. And maybe even an Excel template, yeah. That’d be sweet.
including green/red flags for this kind of (anti)-features. All the things that are important for the back office.
Your description of Thinkific, and taking a look at their homepage (with a page-blocking Black Friday banner), makes me want to drop everything and build a courses platform
