Summary
Accounting Operations
Payplug is a payment institution authorized by the Bank of France (ACPR) since 2016. When you open a Payplug account, you're opening a treasury account with an associated accounting number that should start with 512.
Your Payplug account works like a bank account, with the difference that it doesn't come with a credit card, and you cannot make transfers to third parties (suppliers, customers, etc.).
Throughout the month, the system records in real-time:
- Incoming payments from your customers,
- Customer refunds that you decide to process,
- Any chargeback (fraud/disputes),
- Treasury transfers to your registered bank account.
On the first day of the following month, an invoice is issued and directly debited (VAT included) from your Payplug account as a whole. VAT is calculated and applied to the entire generated invoice, not transaction by transaction.
Thus, Payplug requires immobilization of the amounts that will cover the invoice for the current month.
This immobilization includes:
- The amount of your monthly subscription,
- Transaction fees for operations in the current month,
- Any reserve that might be set up on your account.
All management operations related to your incoming payments are carried out on your Payplug account. You then have the option to transfer the net balance of the immobilization listed above to your bank account.
Reconciliation
It is entirely possible to reconcile the payments processed through Payplug, but these operations should not be performed on your bank account; they should be done directly on your Payplug account. This is because the funds received in your bank account result from a net transfer between accounts after deducting charges and other operations (refunds, oppositions, etc.) processed through Payplug.
Due to this operational mode, it is not possible to associate transactions with transfers made to your bank account. Transfers exclude invoicing fees and refunds. Therefore, for reconciliation, a transaction on your end corresponds to an entry on Payplug.
This operational mode aims to simplify your day-to-day management and ensures you only need to account for a single invoice at the beginning of each month.
Available Documents
To track your activity, you have access to 4 documents:
- Customized Statement
- Monthly Statements
- Breakdown of Fees
- Monthly Invoice
Customized Statement
This document can be downloaded from your Payplug portal at any time, allowing you to monitor the operations recorded on your account day by day.
Each line of this statement, more comprehensive than a standard bank statement, provides the following details for each operation:
- Elements to identify operations: ID, operation date, processing date, sales channel, customer email for payments and refunds, etc.
In the case of an in-store payment, especially through remote collection, the operation date (payment date) may differ from the processing and display date. To match your transfers, it will be important to verify this later processing date.
- Type and description of the operations: customer payment, transfer to your bank account, etc.
- Amount of the operations,
- Breakdown of fees for each operation,
- Gross balance (excluding operation fees),
- Your Payplug account balance after each payment.
Need to view a sample accounting file? Simply download it; it is attached to this article.
It is possible to automatically retrieve this document using our API. The technical documentation is available here.
Monthly Statement
This summary document is issued every month, grouping operations recorded in the accounting export by type for the past month.
The document also includes details of all operations carried out on your Payplug account.
Note: If the details of the operations are too extensive (more than 50 pages), they will not be included in the account statement.
Breakdown of Fees
Downloadable from the Payplug portal during the month, this document helps you understand the breakdown of your billing by providing the commission calculations for each operation. It presents details of fixed and variable fees, as well as the type and country of the card used.
Reminder: Fees are immobilized with each operation and will only be debited once from your Payplug account when the invoice is issued on the first day of the following month.
Monthly Invoice
The invoice can also be downloaded from your Payplug portal and provides a breakdown of the various components:
- Transaction fees,
- Monthly subscription,
- Potential opposition fees.
Tip: The customized statement and the detail of fees are provided in CSV file format. If you encounter difficulties during conversion/import:
In Libre Office / Open Office: convert to UTF-8 and then replace the text delimiter ' with "
In Excel: go to the "Data" tab, then select "Text to Columns" > "Delimited" > choose "Text" as the identifier and change it as needed.
Integrations for ERP and Accounting Tools
To simplify your daily management, we also offer integrations with management software and third-party solutions:
The Budget Insight integration ensures accounting updates on numerous market solutions.
Other integrations are currently in progress; feel free to check our module page for updates.
Most Common Discrepancy Sources
If you don't manage your Payplug account like a bank account, you may frequently encounter discrepancies during reconciliation. Here are the most common cases reported to our team:
Monthly subscription: Be careful to include your monthly subscription amount in the calculation if you're adding up all transactions minus fees and refunds to calculate your transfer sum.
Refunds: If you want to issue a refund but don't have sufficient funds in your Payplug balance, the immobilized sum for invoicing will be used for the refund if possible. These amounts used for refunds will be deducted from your incoming payments in your next transactions to ensure invoicing.
VAT: Payplug calculates VAT on the total transaction sum during invoicing, not on each transaction. You can simulate the cost of VAT per transaction, but there will necessarily be differences, as the sum of rounded amounts differs from the rounded sum.