What "Needs review" means
When Link My Books imports a Shopify payout, we fetch every transaction Shopify includes in it (sales, refunds, fees, disputes, reserves and so on) and check that everything adds up to the exact amount Shopify deposited in your bank account.
A payout shows Needs review when every individual transaction we imported is correct on its own, but the total of all transactions doesn't quite match the amount Shopify actually paid out. The difference is usually small — a few pounds, dollars or euros at most.
Why this happens
Shopify occasionally applies a charge or credit at the payout level that isn't itemised as a transaction we can import. The most common causes are:
Dispute or chargeback fees deducted directly from the payout
Shopify fees (for example billing corrections) applied to the payout as a whole
Adjustments Shopify made to correct an earlier payout
Reserve balance movements — money Shopify held back or released
Before showing you this status, Link My Books automatically re-checks the payout against Shopify a second time to rule out missing data. "Needs review" means the difference is genuinely there on Shopify's side, not an import error.
How to resolve it
Open the payout from your settlements list and click the Needs review status. The popup shows you:
the exact difference (for example −6.93 USD), and
which category of the payout it relates to, based on Shopify's own payout summary.
If the difference is small (up to 20 in your payout currency), you can resolve it yourself in one click:
Choose the category that best describes the difference — Shopify Dispute Fee, Shopify Fee, Adjustment, or Reserve Balance. We pre-select the most likely one for you.
Click Create adjustment.
Link My Books adds a correctly-categorised adjustment line to the payout so it balances to the penny, then generates and posts the settlement to Xero or QuickBooks as normal. Each category posts to its own account, so your books stay accurate and your accountant can see exactly what the adjustment was.
You can safely redo the adjustment with a different category if you picked the wrong one — it replaces the previous adjustment rather than adding a second line.
If the difference is larger than 20
For larger differences we don't offer the one-click fix, because a bigger gap usually means something Shopify should explain or correct. In that case:
check the payout in your Shopify admin (Settings → Payments → View payouts) for any fee, dispute or adjustment shown there, and
contact Shopify support to clarify the deduction — or reach out to us via live chat and we'll investigate it with you.
Will it keep happening?
Payout-level differences are an occasional Shopify behaviour rather than something you can prevent. The good news: once you resolve a payout, it stays resolved — the adjustment survives any re-import or re-processing of that payout.