Correlate payout id with purpose from bank transfer

Accounting & Taxes

Topic summary

Issue: Merchants using Shopify Payments in Germany receive bank transfers credited by “Stripe Technology Europe Ltd.” The bank statement purpose line shows “MyShopName Shopify A1B2C3” (a six-character alphanumeric code), with no order or payout reference.

Observed mismatch: Shopify Admin and the payouts API (/admin/api/2020-10/shopify_payments/payouts.json) list only numeric payout IDs. It’s unclear whether the six-character bank reference encodes the same payout ID or how to retrieve it via API.

Workaround: Correlate payouts by date and amount, which is unreliable for accounting needs.

Additional impact: A second merchant with two Shopify stores reports identical bank statement descriptors (“Stripe Technology Europe”) for both, making it impossible for accountants to distinguish payouts. They expected store-level settings to control the bank statement label but report they do not. An image is referenced showing two indistinguishable payouts on the statement.

Status: No solution or official guidance provided. Open questions include mapping the bank reference to a Shopify payout ID and whether the bank statement descriptor can be customized per store.

Summarized with AI on December 28. AI used: gpt-5.
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We’re getting payouts using Shopify Payments (apparently), and they arrive in the form of bank transfers. The creditor is Stripe Technology Europe Ltd (which is a bit confusing, since Shopify says Stripe isn’t available in Germany). The amounts match, but, the purpose line looks like “MyShopName Shopify A1B2C3”, i.e. three pairs of letters and digits. There is no further reference to any paid orders or anything; this six-letter code is the only ID we seem to get.

If I go to myshopname.myshopify.com/admin/payments/payouts, the payouts, which otherwise do match (in amounts and dates) all have numeric IDs. If I go to /admin/api/2020-10/shopify_payments/payouts.json, I similarly only get those numeric IDs.

Are those different encodings of the same ID? Something like Base 58, maybe? Is there some way to get that same code using an API?

For now, it seems all I can do is correlate based on the date and amount and hope for the best, which, oof.

1 Like
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I’m looking for the answer to this, so if anybody know please help. We have 2 Shopify accounts and the money received shows as a transfer from Stripe Technology Europe on the bank statement, for both Shopify accounts. This is very confusing and the settings in our Shopify account should be the ones that are used to label the payments on the statement However they are not. Very frustrating, and a basic user and finance thing, I’m surprised that this isn’t working given the size of Shopify.

Shown in the image. Two payments received from two different Shopify accounts we own. It’s impossible for our accountants if they are labelled the same. There must be a simple solution to this as I’m sure we are not the only ones in need of this basic feature.