Link My Books Shopify Guide: Payouts, Gateways, Taxes and the Plan That Fits

What Link My Books does for a Shopify store

Link My Books turns each Shopify Payments payout into one summary entry in Xero or QuickBooks Online that matches the bank deposit, and it summarizes sales from other gateways such as PayPal separately. The job for a Shopify merchant is to explain every deposit: Shopify pays out net of fees and refunds, on a different date from the sale. Our Shopify Payments guide covers why the payout and the sales report differ.

The app is listed in the Shopify App Store, where it was launched on December 16, 2021, and the vendor says it needs read-only access to the store. Each Shopify store counts as one sales channel.

How Shopify Payments, PayPal and other gateways are posted

• Shopify Payments: one summary per payout, broken into sales, refunds, fees and taxes.
• Other gateways (PayPal, Klarna, Stripe and others): one monthly summary per gateway and per currency. The help center says it is usually generated by the 3rd of the following month.
• Clearing accounts: each gateway gets its own clearing account in your chart of accounts. The help center says to allocate each gateway's bank deposit to that account, which offsets the summary, and notes that a balance can remain at month end for funds not yet deposited.
• Gateway fees: for third-party gateways the summary reflects gross sales. The help center says to take the monthly fee invoice from each gateway and record it in your ledger yourself.
• Negative payouts: posted to Xero as a bill and offset through the Shopify Balances account when Shopify recovers the amount from a later payout.

A documented mistake to avoid: all gateways are switched on by default, and if one is later deactivated in Settlement Settings, its orders appear in the Shopify Finance Summary but never reach the ledger. If a clearing account keeps growing, see why a clearing balance does not clear.

How Shopify taxes are allocated for US stores

The help center says Link My Books allocates Shopify tax lines by destination. For orders shipped to the United States, tax lines go to a Shopify Sales Tax line for US sales tax, and Canadian tax lines go to a separate Canadian line. For orders shipped to the UK, Australia or New Zealand, tax is merged into the sales lines instead.

Where Shopify marks another party as responsible for the tax, Link My Books posts a tax collected line and a matching tax remitted line, so the two net to zero. Duty collected on international orders is mapped to its own account, nested under the Sales Tax heading on the mapping page.

Which plan fits a Shopify store, with a worked example

Worked example: [your business] runs one Shopify store with about 350 orders a month. One store is one channel, and 350 orders fall in the 500 tier, so the plan is Starter 500 Lite at $35 a month, or $420 over twelve months. Opening a second store, or adding an Amazon account, makes two channels and moves the plan to Plus at $43 a month. Passing a rolling average of 500 orders triggers an email and an automatic upgrade seven days later.

Link My Books' Shopify App Store listing showed lower prices than linkmybooks.com on the same date, $21 against $24 for Starter 200 Lite, so this page uses the linkmybooks.com figures and you should confirm the price at signup. How you subscribe also changes how you cancel. If you install from the Shopify App Store, Shopify bills you, and the only way to stop the charge is to uninstall the app. The account turns read-only at the end of the paid period and the data is permanently deleted 90 days later. A read-only account cannot export, so download anything you need before the paid period ends.

Limits for Shopify merchants and when to use something else

• History: Lite includes 3 months, and the trial imports the last 90 days.
• Third-party gateways: monthly summaries, with fees left for you to record.
• No order-level records: the ledger receives summaries, not individual orders or customers.

If you want every Shopify sale as its own record, or you want to pay nothing extra, the first-party connectors are the alternative. Xero publishes a Shopify integration that it says is free on all Xero plans and can sync per sale, covered in our Shopify Xero integration guide. Intuit publishes a QuickBooks Online connector that it says is included with a QuickBooks subscription, covered in the Shopify QuickBooks integration guide.