Every payment processor deposit lies to you a little. Stripe drops $3,847.92 in your bank account, but your sales report says you sold $4,000 that week. Nothing's wrong. The processor took its cut before the money touched your bank. If your books only record the deposit, you've quietly lost track of $152.08 in fees and the full $4,000 in sales.
A clearing account fixes that. It sits between "a customer paid you" and "the cash landed in your bank." It's how a bookkeeper ties the two together without fudging the numbers.
What is a clearing account?
A clearing account is a temporary balance-sheet account that holds sales and fees until the processor payout lands, then nets to zero. You post the full sale into it when the transaction happens. You post the fee and the net payout out of it when the deposit hits. The balance returns to $0. It's a holding pen, not a permanent account. If it's carrying a balance for more than a few days, something's unreconciled.
- A clearing account is temporary - it holds a balance only until the matching deposit clears, then returns to zero.
- Gross sales and fees post separately - record the full sale amount, then the processor fee, instead of just the net deposit.
- A $3,847.92 deposit isn't $3,847.92 in sales - it's usually $4,000 in sales minus $152.08 in fees, and your books should show both numbers.
- Clearing accounts differ from suspense accounts - a clearing account expects a specific offsetting entry; a suspense account holds an amount you can't yet classify at all.
- An unreconciled clearing balance is a red flag - if it's not back to zero within a few days of the payout, something in the reconciliation broke.
Say a week of Stripe transactions totals $4,000 in gross sales. Stripe charges $152.08 in processing fees and deposits the net, $3,847.92, into your bank account two days later. If you only record the $3,847.92 deposit as revenue, two things go wrong. Your sales figure understates what you actually sold. And your fee expense disappears entirely, which makes your margins look better than they are.
The clearing account is where the two entries meet:
1Entry 1 (at time of sale):
2 Debit Clearing Account (Stripe) $4,000.00
3 Credit Sales Revenue $4,000.00
4
5Entry 2 (at time of payout, 2 days later):
6 Debit Bank Account $3,847.92
7 Debit Processing Fee Expense $152.08
8 Credit Clearing Account (Stripe) $4,000.00
After Entry 2 posts, the clearing account nets to $0.00. Your books now show $4,000 in sales, $152.08 in fees, and $3,847.92 landing in the bank. All three numbers match what actually happened.
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Get startedA clearing account and a suspense account both hold a temporary balance. It's easy to mix them up. A clearing account expects a known, specific offsetting entry. You already know what's going to zero it out (the processor's payout), and roughly when. A suspense account holds a transaction you can't classify yet, with no defined entry waiting to clear it.
The clearing account only does its job if it's actually reconciled. Matching lump-sum processor deposits to individual sales? See how to reconcile lump-sum deposits from payment processors. Fee side is the messy part? Payment processor fee classification covers where those fees belong on your P&L.
This is also where a lot of manual reconciliation time goes: matching one bank deposit against a dozen or more transactions by hand. A clearing account QuickBooks setup can automate that match instead of leaving it to a spreadsheet. Growthy's QuickBooks integrations reads processor deposits and the underlying transactions together, so you don't have to eyeball the math on every payout.
A few days at most, roughly the time between the sale and the processor's payout schedule. If a clearing account balance is more than a week old and hasn't zeroed out, that's usually a sign a payout was missed or misclassified. It's not how the account is supposed to work.
Any business taking card payments through Stripe, Square, or a similar processor benefits from one. Those processors always deduct fees before depositing. A business that only takes checks or ACH transfers, with no processor fees, may not need the extra step.
You can, but you'll lose visibility into gross sales and fee expense as separate line items. That's fine for a very small operation. It becomes a real problem once fee percentages, refunds, or multiple processors are in the mix and you need to see where the money went.
Clearing accounts are a bookkeeping mechanic, not a fix for messy fee coding underneath them. Get the account structure right, and you still have to code fees to the right expense accounts to see accurate margins. See how Growthy syncs QuickBooks with your payment processors to keep deposits, fees, and sales tied together automatically.
Growthy is bookkeeping software, not a CPA firm. This content is educational, not professional advice.
