Why Your Etsy Deposit Doesn't Match Your Sales

You sold $3,000 last month, but the deposits add up to something noticeably lower. Nothing is necessarily wrong. A deposit is the result of many smaller movements in your Payment account, and several of them have nothing to do with the sale itself.

The usual reasons for the gap

• Fees: transaction and payment processing fees are deducted before the deposit.
• Refunds: a refund comes out of your balance, often in a later month than the sale.
• Shipping labels and ads: label purchases and Etsy Ads are charged to your Payment account.
• Shop-level charges: listing fees and subscriptions are not tied to any order.
• Currency conversion: applied when listing and Payment account currencies differ.
• Timing: a sale made on the last day of the month may not be deposited until the next.
• A payment account reserve: part of a sale is held back and released later.

Payment account reserves

If Etsy places a reserve on your account, a percentage of each new physical-item sale is held and is not available for deposit in the standard time. Sales of digital items are not held.

• Funds are released when you add tracking and Etsy can confirm the order is in transit, or when the default holding period passes.
• Everyday charges such as refunds, fees, labels, and Etsy Ads still come out of your current balance while the reserve is in place.
• Held funds are included in your pending balance.
• Orders in reserve show an Order in reserve badge, and the monthly statement CSV has a Status column and an Availability Date column.

Etsy says reserves are placed based on risk factors such as a first sale, a sudden sharp increase in orders or refunds, missing tracking, or late shipping. Shipping on time and uploading tracking are the main ways to get funds released sooner.

How to reconcile a month

1. Download the monthly statement CSV from Finances, then Payment account.
2. Total the sales lines. This is your starting figure.
3. Group every other line by type: fees, refunds, labels, ads, subscriptions, and adjustments.
4. Subtract each group from the sales total. The remainder is the net activity for the month.
5. Compare that to your deposits, then account for any change in pending or reserved funds between the start and end of the month.

If the numbers still do not match after that, look for refunds of earlier-month sales and for lines whose descriptions you do not recognize. Those are the usual remaining causes.