Reconciling your first payout

A payout is processed each time funds you’ve collected from your clients are ready to be paid out to you. All collected payments (of a single currency) that are due to be paid out on a given day are pooled together into one transferable amount and paid out to you. You will receive a maximum of one payout per day, per currency.

When you receive your payout into your bank account, you will notice that the amount does not match the total amount collected from your clients and included in the payout on that date. This is because we deduct our transaction fees at source, in between collecting the funds from your clients and processing them in a payout to you.

Payout notification emails

On the day a payout is due to arrive into your nominated bank account you will receive a payout email. This email will tell you how much you are due to receive into your bank account that day.

Also contained within the email is a unique reference that has been assigned to the payout you’re due to receive that day. This reference will appear on your bank statement alongside the payout you receive.

Finally, the email will contain a link to view the payout in your dashboard. This is where you can view a breakdown of the credits, debits, and fee deductions that make up the payout you’ve received.

Reconciling your credits and debits

Each payout is formed of credits and debits. Credits are the payments you have collected from your clients and form the positive balance. Debits, on the other hand, are any payment amounts that have been deducted from the total funds you collected, before being paid out (not including transaction fees).

A deduction against a payout is usually the result of a refunded payment, a late failure, or a client chargeback being balanced out against your account.

Learn more about payout deductions → 

Exporting payout information

In some cases, you may wish to view additional details about your clients' payments that make up the payout you've received to help with reconciliation. You can do this by exporting payout information from your GoCardless dashboard.

Learn how to export payout information → 

Managing failed payments

In most cases, you will be notified if a payment has failed to be collected one business day following the charge date. For late failures which, albeit rare, can occur even after the funds have been paid out to you, you will be notified once the client’s bank has notified us that the payment was not successfully collected. The client’s bank will provide a reason for the failure, which you can view with the failed payment status record.

Providing you are still authorised to collect payments from your client (i.e. the client still has an active mandate in place), you can retry the payment. This will resubmit the payment for collection and then follow the same process as with the first attempt. 

If you’re ever unsure if you have outstanding failed payments still to be collected, you can troubleshoot ‘payment’ resources with a ‘failed’ status using Events. This is available through your GoCardless dashboard here, or you can query our Events API endpoint [see here].