Stripe payout
A Stripe payout is the net transfer Stripe sends to your business bank account, representing the gross value of card receipts in a settlement period minus Stripe's processing fees, refunds, and any chargeback amounts already deducted.
When Stripe settles with your bank, it does not send one payment per customer transaction. Instead, it batches all charges, refunds, and dispute adjustments from a settlement period and transfers the net figure — typically daily or weekly — as a single bank line. That single line is the payout.
Why it complicates Xero reconciliation
The payout amount your bank feed shows will almost never match any individual invoice in Xero. It also does not include Stripe’s processing fees as a separate deduction — those are silently netted off before the transfer arrives. This means matching the payout directly to an invoice is always incorrect: it overstates income, leaves fees unrecorded, and misrepresents your accounts receivable balance.
The correct approach is payout decomposition: post the gross receipts to a dedicated Stripe clearing account in Xero, then record fees as a separate expense and apply refunds or chargebacks individually before the net clears to your real bank account. For example, if a weekly payout of £1,840.00 represents £1,900.00 of card receipts minus £60.00 in Stripe fees, those two figures need separate ledger entries — not one £1,840.00 receipt against an invoice.
Automated matching tools can pull the payout’s line-by-line breakdown from the Stripe API and post each component to the correct nominal code overnight, leaving only genuine exceptions for review.