What Was That Deposit Made Of? Payouts, Refunds and Reconciliation
A bank deposit now breaks down by fund, restricted money included. Refunds show what they actually cost you, and reconciliation tells you when the processor and your books disagree.
One line arrives on your bank statement. It is the sum of forty-one gifts, two refunds and a week of processing fees, and some of the money in it is restricted.
Reconciling that line is the job nobody budgets time for and everybody does twice: once in the processor’s dashboard, once in a spreadsheet. Three screens in Muin now do it instead.
Settlement by fund
Open Smart Payments → Payouts. Alongside the list of transfers, each with its status and arrival date, there is a Settlement by fund card that answers the actual question: what was this deposit made of?
Set an arrival date range and open a deposit. You get a fund table with Fund, Restriction, Gifts, Gross, Fees and Net. Gifts, fees and refunds also appear as their own lines, and the lines sum to the bank deposit. Export it as CSV or Excel.
Each deposit carries a state, and the third one is the point:
- Ties out. The fund lines add up to the deposit.
- Needs review. There is a variance. Open it and see where.
- Not yet itemized. The deposit’s contents have not come back from the provider yet, so its funds are unknown. The daily sync fills this in.
That last state exists because a blank breakdown and a breakdown of zero are different facts, and showing zero would be a lie you find at audit. A warning above the list tells you how many payouts do not yet tie out.
One thing Muin does not do: change your payout schedule. That lives on your Stripe account, and Muin has no setting for it. If payouts pause, that is your provider’s decision about account verification, and the honest answer is to send you to the account state rather than invent a reason.
A refund’s headline amount is not its cost
The Refund Register (Smart Payments → Refunds) opens on a date range and four cards: refunds issued, total refunded, fees returned, and refund rate. Then one card most refund reports skip, called Where the money went, which splits the figure three ways: returned to payers, provider fee returned, platform fee returned.
That split matters because only the fee the provider and platform give back reduces what the refund cost you. A zero in a fee line means your organization absorbed it. A report that shows only the headline amount is overstating the recovery.
The detail panel has a field worth knowing before you answer a donor: Completed. Until it is set, the refund is still with the provider and the money has not left the account. It can sit there for days. The panel says so rather than letting “refunded” be read as “arrived”.
For a nonprofit, the receipt follows the money. A full refund voids the tax receipt; a partial refund voids the original and issues an amended one for the amount the donor actually kept giving. Giving history and the year-end statement move with it. A chargeback does the same bookkeeping without a second call to the provider, because the payer’s bank has already taken the money and refunding again would pay twice. If a receipt had already gone out, an alert tells you exactly what was reversed.
Donors can also ask for a refund themselves, and those requests land in their own queue on the same screen with their own statuses. Approving one is explicit about what happens: the amount, the payer’s email, and that the refund goes to the provider immediately and cannot be recalled. Declining requires a reason, because the donor is emailed what you write. If your organization sets an approval threshold and has at least two eligible approvers, a large refund is held on one signature and nothing goes to the provider until a second person approves it.
Where the processor and your books disagree
Smart Payments → Payment Reconciliation reconciles on two axes.
Run Reconciliation compares the processor’s charges against your Muin records over a date range and sorts the differences into four kinds:
| Type | What happened |
|---|---|
| Missing in Stripe | Muin has a transaction the provider does not. Usually one recorded by hand. |
| Missing Locally | The provider charged something Muin never recorded. The money moved and your books do not know. |
| Amount Mismatch | Both have it, at different amounts. |
| Status Mismatch | Both have it, at different statuses. Often settlement timing. |
Run it after each payout, so a mismatch is only ever one payout wide. Export the discrepancies, and read History, which records every run. That history is the evidence that you reconciled, which is the thing an auditor asks for and a spreadsheet cannot show.
Entity matching is the second axis, and a different question: does every captured payment point at the thing it paid for? An invoice, a donation, a membership, an event registration, a tuition enrollment. A payment that is captured but unlinked is money you have that your records cannot explain. Confident matches are made for you, Try matching all re-runs the matcher over the rest, and anything it cannot place stays visible on the list rather than disappearing. When the list is clear it says so: “Every captured payment is linked to what it paid for.”
Undoing a match is honest about its consequence too: “The payment stays captured, but the invoice or registration it was linked to returns to unpaid.”
For nonprofits: the deposits nobody can trace
On the donation side, the reconciliation register has one action worth calling out. When a bank row cannot be traced to anyone, Record as unidentified gift posts the money to your books now, against a hidden placeholder, so nothing is left unexplained. The confirmation is specific about what it does not do: the giver is not added to your donor directory, mailing lists or exports, and no tax receipt is sent.
The gift waits in a follow-up queue. When you learn who gave it, one action moves every gift held under that placeholder into the donor’s giving history. Muin warns you about the two things that change as a result: a gift of $250 or more alters what the donor can substantiate, and if an annual statement for that year has already gone out, their copy is now out of date.
That is a better answer than the two alternatives. Guessing produces a wrong receipt. Leaving it out produces books that do not balance.
What ties all of this together
Each of these screens refuses to report a number it did not earn. A payout that has not been itemized says “not yet itemized” instead of showing zero funds. A refund report separates what came back from what the headline says. A reconciliation run that fails says it failed, so its previous result is not mistaken for this window’s. A deposit nobody can trace gets recorded as exactly that.
Reconciliation is only worth doing if a clean result means something. These screens are built so it does.
Related Reading
- How to reconcile 500+ donations a month without a spreadsheet: matching card, Zelle, check, ACH and cash gifts to the right donor