Your marketplace isn't in A2X or Link My Books. Now what?

Your channel is on the unsupported list

If you sell on Temu, Whatnot, Vinted, Wayfair, Wish or Depop and keep your books in Xero or QuickBooks, there is no connector for you. This is not a gap you have to infer from a pricing page - Link My Books publishes the list outright, naming eighteen channels it does not support:

BigCommerce, B&Q, Depop, Ecwid, Groupon, Magento, Not On The High Street, OnBuy, OpenCart, PayPal, PrestaShop, Stripe, Temu, Vinted, Wayfair, Whatnot, Wix eCommerce, Wish

• Sales channels not currently supported by Link My Books

A2X covers a shorter list still: Amazon, Shopify, eBay, Etsy, Walmart and PayPal. Its TikTok Shop support only works when the orders flow through Shopify first, and it offers no way to bring an unsupported channel in from a CSV at all. Its support note on channels it does not cover

• written about Magento and WooCommerce, and old enough to predate several of the channels it now supports - says only that it will add them "as soon as we are able to deliver a world-class, accurate solution".

Check the list on the day you read this rather than trusting the version above. These pages move: Link My Books already has a Whatnot integration marked "Coming Soon" with a waitlist, even though Whatnot is still on the unsupported list today.

What does the vendor actually tell you to do?

Do it by hand. That is the official remedy, in the vendor's own words:

If your sales channel allows you to export order data (e.g., as a CSV file), this data would need to be processed and entered into your accounting software (Xero or QuickBooks) separately.

• Link My Books, on unsupported channels

The page offers one alternative: route the orders through a platform that is supported. That works if your sales genuinely pass through Shopify or WooCommerce on the way. It does nothing for a marketplace that owns the whole transaction - which is exactly what Temu, Whatnot and Vinted do.

So the answer is manual entry, and the answer is correct. What the sentence leaves out is the part that decides whether your accounts end up right: how to enter it. That is where most of the damage happens, and it is the rest of this article.

Why can't you just book the deposit and move on?

Because the deposit is not your revenue, and treating it as revenue understates two things at once.

A marketplace payout is already net. The platform has taken its commission, possibly shipping, possibly advertising, possibly a returns adjustment, and sends you what is left. If you book that figure as a sale, your revenue is short by every fee deducted - and your expenses are short by exactly the same amount, because those fees never appear anywhere in your books.

The totals still balance, which is why this survives so long undetected. Your profit figure is even roughly right. What is wrong is everything you would use to make a decision:

• Margin per channel is unusable. You cannot see that a marketplace takes 20% until the 20% is recorded somewhere.
• Fee changes become invisible. If commission never appears as an expense, a rate rise shows up only as a smaller deposit and reads as weaker sales.
• Returns and refunds disappear into a smaller net number instead of being visible as returns, so you cannot see a product with a return problem.
• Reconciliation stops being a check. If the deposit is booked as the sale, the bank line always matches by construction, and matching stops telling you anything.

Then there is the part that eventually arrives by post. Marketplaces report gross payments to tax authorities. The instructions for Form 1099-K define that gross amount as the total "without regard to any adjustments for credits, cash equivalents, discount amounts, fees, refunded amounts, shipping amounts, or any other amounts" - so the figure reported about you is the one before everything the marketplace deducted. The IRS position on the rest is blunt: "No matter the amount of reported payments, if you receive payments for selling goods or services, you must report all income on your tax return." In the EU, DAC7 obliges platforms including Vinted to report sellers who pass 30 transactions or €2,000 in a year.

A seller whose books contain only net deposits has revenue visibly below the figure the platform reported, and nothing on file to explain the difference. The bridge from gross to net is exactly the fee and refund detail that was never recorded. Whether and how any of this applies to you depends on your jurisdiction and registration - the point is that the gap is documented somewhere even when it is not documented in your ledger.

How do you book a payout properly?

With a clearing account per marketplace, so that the payout becomes a settlement of amounts you already recorded rather than the record itself.

The shape is the same one accountants use for Stripe and PayPal, and it works here for the same reason. Create an asset account - "Temu clearing", "Whatnot clearing" - and run every payout through it:

1. Gross sales credit revenue and debit the clearing account. The full amount the customer paid, before the platform took anything.
2. Commission and platform fees debit a fee expense and credit clearing.
3. Shipping and advertising deductions debit their own expense accounts and credit clearing.
4. Refunds and returns debit a contra-revenue account and credit clearing.
5. Withheld amounts - money the platform is holding back, whether a reserve or funds pending delivery confirmation - move out of clearing into an asset account of their own, so a payout can settle to zero while the held money stays visible.
6. The bank deposit debits your bank account and credits clearing.

The check that makes this worth doing: after a payout is fully entered, the clearing account for that period should return to zero. If it does not, the remainder is something the marketplace did that you have not accounted for - an unrecorded fee, a refund, a withheld amount. A balance that will not clear is the marketplace telling you where to look.

One legitimate exception: a payout that straddles your month end leaves a real balance, representing sales made but not yet settled. That is correct accrual accounting rather than an error - but it looks identical to a mistake unless you check the residue against the platform's own pending balance at the same moment.

There is also a tax subtlety worth raising with your accountant. Where a marketplace collects and remits sales tax on your behalf, that money is never yours: it should not pass through your revenue or sit as a liability you will never pay. Sellers get this wrong in both directions.

That is the whole difference between manual entry that works and manual entry that quietly corrupts your accounts. Same CSV, same hour of work.

What makes Temu and Whatnot harder than the rest?

Both break the assumption that one payout maps to one period of sales.

Temu holds funds until the buyer confirms receipt, on a settlement window usually described as 15 to 30 days after delivery is confirmed. Sales and cash therefore sit in different months by design, which makes the withheld-funds account from the previous section necessary rather than optional. It also nets deductions, penalties and refunds against the payout, so one deposit can carry adjustments belonging to orders from weeks earlier. Its returns window runs to 90 days and includes returnless refunds on low-value or damaged items - a revenue reversal with no stock coming back, which means the cost of goods must not be reversed with it. That last one is quietly the easiest way to overstate profit while trying to be careful.

Whatnot is the opposite problem: not opacity but speed. Earnings can reach a US seller's balance within hours of delivery confirmation, so instead of one weekly settlement there are many small payouts, and a live auction produces hundreds of low-value lines per show.

The saving grace is that Whatnot's reporting is unusually good - per-livestream CSV exports, weekly order reports, seller statements and a transaction ledger you can trace back to individual orders. That changes the job from rebuilding sales order by order to summarising the weekly statement into one set of journals, which is entirely doable by hand.

The general rule: the more a marketplace nets against your payout, the less the deposit resembles your sales, and the more the clearing account earns its keep.

Is there a tool that covers my channel?

Sometimes - but read what it actually connects to before you buy.

Seller Ledger supports Whatnot, Depop, Poshmark, Mercari and others, priced from $10 a month at 250 transactions up to $100 for unlimited. The catch for anyone reading this: it is standalone accounting, not a bridge into Xero or QuickBooks. It positions itself as an alternative to them, and data comes out as CSV - "back up your data, send it to an accountant, or analyze to your heart's content".

If your books live in Xero, that leaves you where you started: either migrate your entire accounting to a different system because of one sales channel, or keep exporting and entering by hand.

Pipe17 does sync Temu orders, fulfilment, refunds and payout data into QuickBooks Online, but it is built for operations at a scale most small sellers are not at.

The honest summary: for the unsupported channels there is usually something, and it usually solves a different problem than the one you have.

What about multiple currencies and settlement cycles?

They break the naive approach a second time, independently of everything above.

Sell into several regions and payouts arrive in different currencies on different schedules. Exchange differences between the sale date and the payout date have to land somewhere deliberate rather than being absorbed into revenue, and the rate your accounting software uses will not match the one your bank applied, so small variances need a home too.

The practical consequence: one clearing account per marketplace per settlement currency, not one per marketplace. A seller on Temu settling in dollars and Vinted settling in euros runs two, plus a single account for exchange gains and losses that both feed into.

Settlement cycles compound it. Whatnot pays within hours, Temu holds for weeks, Vinted releases a couple of days after the buyer confirms - three different cut-offs against one month end. And deductions are frequently taken from the following payout rather than the current one, so a deposit can be short for a reason that belongs to a period you already closed.

None of this is exotic accounting. It is only invisible when the deposit is booked as the sale, because then there is nothing left to disagree.

When is it worth automating?

When the cost of the mistakes exceeds the cost of the fix - which usually arrives before the hours do.

Manual entry has two costs, and the obvious one is the smaller. The hours are visible and annoying. The error rate is invisible and compounding: a fee category quietly misposted for eight months is eight months of wrong margin, and you find out when you try to work out whether a channel is worth keeping.

A rough way to think about the decision, without pretending there is a formula:

• Under a few dozen orders a month on one unsupported channel - hand entry with a clearing account is genuinely fine. Do that.
• Several hundred orders, or more than one unsupported channel - the entry stops being the problem and the reconciliation starts being it. This is where a small custom pipeline pays back: pull the settlement export, map it to the same handful of lines above, push it into Xero or QuickBooks.
• When the marketplace offers no export at all - be careful. Some channels give you nothing but a screen in a seller dashboard, and no amount of engineering conjures data that is not published.

The build itself is not large. It is a scheduled job that reads a settlement file, groups it into gross sales, fees, shipping, refunds and withheld amounts, and writes one journal per payout - which is the same shape whether the channel is Temu, Wayfair or something that does not exist yet. That is one scoped job with a known price, and the cost of an automation fix is worth reading before you commission one. You can size it yourself before talking to anyone.

Sources

• Sales channels not currently supported by Link My Books - the eighteen-channel list and the official remedy
• A2X integrations - what A2X does cover
• Whatnot to Xero, "Coming Soon" - evidence the lists move
• Seller Ledger for Whatnot - standalone accounting, CSV export, pricing
• Pipe17 Temu integration - Temu into QuickBooks Online at operational scale
• Understanding your Form 1099-K, IRS - marketplaces report gross