A vendor payout report your accountant will accept separates gross sales, your share, the vendor share, refunds and tax — by vendor, for a defined period — and exports as CSV. The requirement comes from a specific fact about consignment: for goods you do not own, the money passing through you is not all your revenue. A report that shows one total does not let anybody work out which part was yours.
Why consignment reporting is a different shape
In an ordinary retail sale, the customer's money is your revenue and the goods were your cost. One number in, one number out.
In consignment the gross passes through you and a defined share belongs to someone else. Between the sale and the payout, that share is a liability. After the payout it is an expense. It was never your revenue at any point.
So a report showing "£12,400 in sales this month" is not wrong so much as unusable — nobody can tell from it what the business earned. What is needed is the split, per vendor, for a period that matches how you actually pay.
What the report has to contain
- Gross sales, by vendor. The full customer-facing value of what each vendor's goods sold for.
- Your share. The commission you retained — your actual revenue from those sales.
- The vendor share. A liability until paid, an expense once paid. The distinction matters at period end.
- Refunds, against the period the original sale belongs to. Not the period the refund happened in. This is the one most tools get wrong.
- Discounts, and whose share absorbed them.
- Tax, separated, with its treatment depending on who is seller of record.
- The period covered, explicitly, including the arrears offset.
Two columns often missing and worth insisting on: the commission rate applied per line — rates change, and a report that hides which applied is unverifiable — and carried balances, where a vendor fell under the payout threshold.
The refund period problem
Worth its own section because it produces reports that do not reconcile.
An item sells in March and is refunded in May. Which month does the reversal belong to?
For accounting, it generally belongs against the period of the original sale, because that is the period whose revenue was overstated. For your payout ledger, it has to appear in May, because that is when the adjustment hits what you pay.
Both are right for their purpose, and a report that only does one will disagree with either your accounts or your bank. What you want is a report that shows the adjustment in the payout period while identifying the original order and its date, so an accountant can restate if they need to.
Handling refunds against payouts covers the operational side of the same problem.
Who is the seller of record?
The question that changes the tax treatment, and the one worth asking an accountant before the first payout.
If you are seller of record, the customer bought from you. The full sale is your turnover for tax purposes and the vendor share is a cost. If the vendor is seller of record — more common in marketplace arrangements — only your commission is your turnover, and you may be handling their tax on their behalf.
The answer depends on your jurisdiction and on how the agreement is written, which is exactly why it should be settled in writing early. It determines your VAT or sales tax position, what appears on the customer's receipt, and what your reports need to separate.
Getting it wrong is not a reporting problem you fix later. It is a filing position you have already taken.
The reports you need that are not for the accountant
Two more views earn their place, and neither is a compliance requirement.
Sell-through by vendor. What percentage of what a vendor brought in has actually sold, and how long the rest has been sitting. This is the number that makes the unsold-stock conversation easy, because it replaces an opinion with a figure — and it tells you which vendors to give more space to.
Margin by vendor, not just commission. Your share of a vendor's sales is not your profit from them. A vendor whose goods are bulky, get handled a lot, or generate returns costs more to carry than the commission suggests. Comparing your share against the effort is how you decide who to renew.
Both are trivially derivable from data you already have and almost never looked at, usually because the monthly cycle absorbs the attention. Worth running quarterly rather than monthly — they are decisions, not operations.
Reconciling against Shopify
Any payout report should be checkable against Shopify's own order data, and the check is worth running monthly rather than annually.
- Total gross by vendor in the payout report should equal the sum of those vendors' line items in Shopify for the period.
- Refunds in the report should match Shopify's refunds for those orders.
- Your share plus vendor share plus discounts should equal gross. If it does not, something is being netted silently.
- Paid amounts should match your bank, allowing for carried balances under the threshold.
A mismatch in the first usually means a product was not attributed to a vendor, which is the commonest error in consignment and the reason to automate attribution.
What to keep, and for how long
Retention periods vary by jurisdiction, and the practical answer is longer than you think. What matters is keeping the right things:
- The statement as sent, per vendor per period, unaltered. This is your record of what you told them and what they accepted.
- Proof of payment, matched to the statement.
- The vendor agreement, including any rate changes and when they took effect.
- The underlying order data, which Shopify retains but which you should be able to export independently.
The immutability point is the important one. A payout marked paid should not be editable afterwards; corrections belong in the next period as visible adjustments. A payout history that can be silently rewritten is not a record, and it is the first thing that fails under scrutiny.
Getting it out of the system
CSV export is not a nice-to-have. Your accountant works in a spreadsheet or an accounting package, and neither reads a dashboard.
What to check before committing to any tool:
- Does it export per period, per vendor, with all the columns above?
- Can you export history, or only the current period?
- Does the export match what the dashboard shows? Worth verifying once — rounding differences between a displayed figure and an exported one cause real confusion at year end.
Payvenda reports profit, store share, vendor share, refunds and tax per vendor, exportable as CSV.
Where to go next
Settle who is seller of record before the first payout, because it determines everything else. Then make the monthly reconciliation a habit — it catches attribution errors while they are small. The wider setup is in the consignment and vendor payouts guide, and what belongs on a vendor's own statement in giving vendors a portal.
