Manual payouts
As well as explaining payouts Stripe sends automatically, DoubleAgent can explain payouts you trigger yourself.
Unlike automatic payouts, where DoubleAgent adds explanations directly to the payout transaction, manual payouts require an extra step.
It goes like this:
- When the manual payout arrives in your bank account, DoubleAgent explains it as Other Money In → Receipt into Contra Account.
- When the next automatic payout arrives, DoubleAgent adds an Other Money Out → Payment from Contra Account explanation to the automatic payout's transaction, and then adds to it expanations for everything you intuitively expected was in the manual payout.
At first glance this seems a bit odd. Why not just explain the manual payout directly?
The reason is that Stripe doesn't know for sure which charges and so on were included in the manual payout. It sounds surprising but does actually make sense.
So what Stripe does is this: at each automatic payout, it lists all the charges and so on since the last automatic payout, along with the amount of any manual payouts. The manual payouts are effectively a "blob" of funds which can't be broken down into constituent charges, fees etc.
You can think of a manual payout as an advance from the next automatic payout.
The most natural way to explain this in FreeAgent is this: the manual payout's funds are allocated to the contra account, and then moved back out of the contra account onto the next automatic payment, which can then be explained as normal. So this is what DoubleAgent does.
