#payments
Manage payment processing, tracking, and reconciliation efficiently
QR-code phishing (quishing) can redirect a vendor payment or capture a customer's card by swapping one image. The defenses are ordinary bookkeeping controls—verify the vendor master, separate approval from payment release, and reconcile QR channels daily.
Stripe deducts fees, holds refunds, and settles net, so your bank deposit never equals your revenue. Book the gross sale, expense the fee separately, and treat each payout as a transfer from your Stripe balance, then reconcile to Stripe's balance in under 30 minutes a month.
Visa's Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP) merges TC40 fraud reports and TC15 disputes into one ratio, and the 2026 merchant "excessive" threshold dropped to 0.9%. This guide shows exactly how the ratio is calculated and gives small merchants a prevention and gross-to-net bookkeeping playbook to stay under it.
eBay's July 1, 2026 fee reform cuts final value fees to flat 5% for used and refurbished goods and raises new-goods fees to 7% for commercial sellers on selected marketplaces. Learn how the 5% vs 7% split changes reseller margins, why private sellers are unaffected, and how to reconcile gross 1099-K sales to net payouts without losing the fee deduction.
Florida SB 606 takes effect July 1, 2026 and redefines restaurant fee disclosure: every mandatory operations charge — service charges, auto-gratuities, delivery fees, and card surcharges — must be shown on menus, contracts, and ordering apps in compliant font, on the face of the bill, and as three separate receipt lines for tip, operations charge, and sales tax. Learn what counts as an operations charge, where to disclose, and how to book each line correctly.
Adyen H1 2026: Net revenue of €1.30B (up 19% YoY, 21% constant currency), processed volume of €803.8B (up 24%), take rate compressed to 16.2 bps after the first tiered pricing in the company's 20-year history—around €48M in revenue forgone—plus its first two acquisitions ever (Talon.One for €750M and Orb for ~€310M), EBITDA margin of 49.2%, tracked line-by-line through a public Beancount ledger.
Starting February 19, 2026, Visa+ stops working for PayPal and Venmo transfers and is replaced by direct phone-number payments rolling out November 2025. With the 1099-K threshold falling to $600 in 2026, freelancers must tag inter-app transfers correctly, reconcile gross versus net per platform, and separate business from personal flows to avoid double-counting income.
Illinois' Interchange Fee Prohibition Act bans swipe fees on the sales tax and gratuity portions of card transactions starting July 1, 2026 — the first US law of its kind. Learn how to prove tax and tips per transaction, choose between the real-time exemption and the 180-day rebate, and structure a chart of accounts that captures every dollar either way.
Shopify payouts are net settlements, not revenue — gross sales minus fees, refunds, reserve holds, and Capital remittances across a 1-3 day settlement window. This guide shows the clearing-account method to reconcile every payout, handle rolling reserves and Shopify Capital correctly, and match 1099-K gross to ledger sales.
Congress restored the federal 1099-K threshold to $20,000 and 200 transactions in July 2025, but nine states still require a form at $600 and four more sit between $1,000 and $2,500 — so a $650 Etsy sale produces a 1099-K in Massachusetts and nothing in Texas. Includes the state-by-state threshold tiers and how to reconcile a gross form total down to actual taxable profit.
AI agents now check out on a customer's behalf over the same card rails, so an agentic sale books like any card sale — but the payout looks identical to a normal one unless you tag it. A merchant's guide to channel tags, gross-vs-net payout splits, storing intent and cart mandate IDs, daily reconciliation, and the product-data hygiene agents actually read.
Zelle is not a third-party settlement organization under Section 6050W, so it files no 1099-K at any amount — while Venmo, PayPal, Cash App, Stripe, and Square do once the federal threshold of more than $20,000 and more than 200 transactions is met, restored retroactively by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Income is taxable either way, and this guide shows the reconciliation system that keeps multi-rail freelance books accurate.
