What your Fresha payout actually contains

The payout is a wallet transfer, not a sales report

Fresha never sends card money straight to your bank. Every client payment lands first in your Fresha business wallet. Fresha nets its fees out of that wallet, and whatever remains is transferred to your bank account as a line called "Payout release". Two steps, not one.

This is why the deposit on your bank statement never matches any single report in your dashboard. The sales report shows what clients paid. The payout shows what was left in the wallet after fees, refunds, and anything else Fresha pulled out, bundled across whatever period your payout schedule covers.

Speaking of schedules: you can have the wallet pay out daily, weekly, or monthly, and the transfer typically arrives the next business day. A daily schedule makes each deposit small and traceable. A monthly one rolls hundreds of transactions into a single number, which is where reconciliation usually goes sideways.

Card processing fees: your invoice has the real number

Every card payment loses a small slice before it reaches the wallet, and the rate depends on where you are and how the card was used. There is no single universal Fresha rate, so distrust any article that quotes one without a region attached.

• EU: 1.29% + €0.20 per transaction.
• UK: around 1.29% + 20p.
• US: roughly 2.29% + $0.20 in person and 2.79% + $0.20 online, per third-party figures.

Card type matters too, so two identical haircuts can carry slightly different fees. Treat the numbers above as orientation, not gospel.

The exact rate you pay is printed on your Fresha invoice. That document, not a blog post, is the source of truth when you're checking whether a payout adds up.

The new-client fee: the line that actually surprises people

When a brand-new client finds you through the Fresha marketplace, Fresha takes a one-time commission of about 20% (minimum around $6) on that client's first completed appointment. That's the whole deal: one fee, once per new client. Their second visit is free of it, and clients who book you directly never trigger it at all.

The fee base is narrower than the receipt. It excludes add-ons picked at checkout, memberships, gift cards, and tips. There's also a maximum cap on the fee, though Fresha doesn't publish the amount.

If you want to see how these fees stack up in a real payout rather than in the abstract, paste one into the Fresha payout decomposer and it will pull the lines apart for your own numbers.

The lines that aren't your money at all

Several things in a payout are cash you're holding for someone else. They inflate the deposit without being revenue, and booking them as sales quietly overstates your income.

• Tax or VAT is collected with each sale and paid out with it. Fresha doesn't withhold it. It arrives in your bank, but it belongs to the tax authority, so it's a liability you owe onward.
• Tips pass through to you and are tracked separately from sales. They're money you owe staff, and they're excluded from the new-client fee base.
• Gift cards are a liability the day they're sold. They only become revenue when someone redeems them for an actual service.
• Deposits do get paid out, but they stay a liability until the client shows up and the sale completes.

Deposits cause the classic timing mismatch: the money arrives in March's payout, the appointment happens in April, and neither month's payout matches that month's sales. Nothing is wrong. The cash and the sale simply live in different periods.

Refunds and chargebacks: money leaving the wallet

Refunds are the simple case. Refund a client and the amount comes out of your wallet, so the next payout is smaller. Annoying, but visible.

Chargebacks are sneakier. When a client disputes a charge with their bank, the disputed amount plus a penalty is debited straight from your wallet. It shows up as a wallet debit, not as a sales line, so you can scroll your sales reports forever and never find it.

If a payout is short by an amount no report explains, check the wallet activity for debits before you assume a fee changed. A single chargeback with its penalty is often the entire discrepancy.

Making the payout tie out

Put together, the arithmetic of a payout looks like this: gross card sales, minus processing fees, minus any new-client fees, minus refunds and chargeback debits, plus deposits and gift card sales and tips and tax that are passing through. The result is one bank deposit that matches no report because it's a blend of revenue, liabilities, and fees from different days.

The fix in your books is to stop treating the deposit as income and start splitting it into those parts: revenue to revenue, tips and tax and gift cards to liability accounts, fees to expenses. A salon chart of accounts set up with those liability accounts makes the split routine instead of a monthly puzzle.

From there it's mechanics, and the steps depend on your software. We've written up the exact workflow for reconciling Fresha payouts in QuickBooks and for Xero. Start with your most recent payout, split it once, and the number that used to look arbitrary becomes five lines you can check against your own dashboard in a couple of minutes.