Running it
Your sheet and their export will disagree
Timing differences and fee handling account for nearly every gap, and finding out which is a yearly hour well spent.
Guides on Running it: The admin that turns income into a trade
Your own record of the year and the platform's export of the same year will not match, and the difference is almost never an error by either party. Three causes explain nearly all of it: what date a transaction is attributed to, whether fees are shown gross or net, and money that moved without being a job.
An hour spent identifying which cause produced your particular gap is the difference between a filed number you can explain and one you guessed.
Do this before you file, not during
The reconciliation is a separate task from the return and it belongs earlier.
An unexplained difference found on the evening of a deadline becomes a decision made under pressure, and the decision is usually to accept whichever number is larger and hope. Found in advance, the same difference is a twenty-minute investigation with a definite answer.
It also matters more than it used to, because platforms now report to tax authorities themselves. GOV.UK's guidance for platform sellers says UK operators have reported seller income to HMRC under rules that started on 1 January 2024, and must give you a copy of what they reported. In the US, the IRS says a payment platform issues Form 1099-K when payments exceed $20,000 in more than 200 transactions. Either way, a gap between your figure and the platform's is a gap the tax authority can see too.
Put it at the start of the annual cycle rather than the end, which is where the four phases of a tax year place it for exactly this reason.
The three causes, in order of likelihood
Timing at the boundary
You record a job when you deliver it. The platform records it when the payment settles, or when it releases from a hold, or when the payout batch runs.
Those are different dates and at the end of December they fall in different years. A job delivered on the twenty-eighth and released on the third appears in your year and their next one, and that single job is a whole gap.
The fix is not to change your method. It is to keep a note of the jobs that straddle the boundary, both at the start and at the end of the year, and check that each appears exactly once across the two years rather than twice or never. Which date your return should use is jurisdictional and is one of the better questions to put to a professional in a first conversation.
Fees shown differently
Platforms report either the buyer's payment or your payout, and the two differ by every deduction between them.
If your sheet holds the gross and their summary holds the net, the gap is exactly the fees, and confirming that is arithmetic rather than investigation. Processing charges, currency conversion and withdrawal costs frequently sit in different columns from the commission, or in no column at all, which is the point of separating the four deductions in your own records rather than trusting one summary figure.
Currency adds a second layer, because the rate applied at conversion is rarely the rate on the day of the job, and cross-border payouts covers where those differences come from.
Money that was not a job
Tips, bonuses, referral credits, promotional adjustments and refunds all move money without corresponding to a delivered piece of work.
They are frequently absent from your per-job sheet by construction, since your sheet has one row per job. Tips in particular are the classic omission, which is why tips and gifts as income treats untracked money as its own category.
Refunds cause a specific mismatch worth knowing about: a refunded job may vanish from a platform summary while remaining in your records, and the fee on the original payment is often not returned, so the net effect is a small loss rather than a clean reversal.
A working method
| Step | What you are doing |
|---|---|
| 1 | Export the platform's full transaction list, not the summary |
| 2 | Total your own gross, fees and net for the year |
| 3 | Compare gross to gross, and only then net to net |
| 4 | List every boundary job at each end of the year |
| 5 | Subtract non-job movements from the platform total |
| 6 | Write down what remains and why |
Step three catches most people. Comparing your net against their gross produces a gap the size of the fees and a half hour of confusion, and doing the gross comparison first makes the fee difference obvious rather than mysterious.
Step six is the one nobody does and the one that pays off in year two, because next year's gap will have the same shape and you will already know its name.
When the gap does not resolve
If a difference survives all three explanations and is material, raise it with the platform while the year is recent, since support access to old transaction detail thins out quickly.
Take the export before you need it, not after. Historical reports are typically available only while an account is open, which is the practical argument in keeping records after you stop.
What the export cannot tell you
A platform's report is a record of money and not of work, which is the limit worth remembering when you use it to make decisions.
It cannot tell you which format paid best per hour, because it does not know your hours. It cannot tell you why a quarter was quiet. What a delivered assessment should contain to justify its price is a craft question owned elsewhere, and Measure My Cock's account of method is the reference for it; how buyers read the resulting scores is covered at Penis Rater; and what a commissioner expects the transaction itself to look like is Rate Penis on etiquette.
For earnings on Rate Cock, the transaction history and payout records that this exercise compares against live in the judge account described on the judges page.
The reconciliation is worth an hour a year even when it resolves to nothing, because the year it does not resolve to nothing is the year you would otherwise have filed a number you could not defend.