Why don't my SimplePractice deposits match my session income?

Nothing is broken and you are not missing money. The amount that shows up in your bank account is a payout from the payment processor, and fees have already come out of it. Payouts are also batched on the processor’s schedule rather than one per session, so a single deposit usually covers charges from several appointments across several days.

Fees are the first gap. Card processing on practice platforms commonly runs somewhere around 3 percent plus a small per-transaction fee, though the exact rate varies by platform, plan, and card type, so it is worth checking your own statement instead of assuming. Say you see eight private-pay clients at $150. Your session ledger says $1,200. At roughly 3 percent plus about 30 cents per charge, something like $38 comes off the top and about $1,162 lands in the bank. Run a full caseload every week and that quietly adds up to a few hundred dollars a month, which is real money and a real business expense.

Timing is the second gap. A Wednesday deposit might include Friday’s and Monday’s charges, and charges from the last days of the month often settle in the next month. Even when every single number is correct, your calendar month and your bank month will not line up by themselves.

There are smaller reasons too. Refunds and chargebacks get netted out of a payout. A card may have declined, so a session you completed was never actually paid. Client balances can still be sitting unpaid, sliding scale adjustments change what was charged, and insurance payments arrive on their own rhythm from a different source entirely.

Here is the part that matters. If you record that $1,162 deposit as income and stop there, your revenue is understated and your processing fees never appear in the books at all. You lose a legitimate expense, and you never get to see what payment processing costs your practice. Bookkeeping for therapists comes down to keeping both numbers honest, recording the gross $1,200 as revenue and the fees as their own expense line so the net ties out to what the bank shows.

The way to get there is a monthly reconciliation of three things, your platform’s payout or settlement report, the payouts themselves, and the bank deposits. That is ordinary work in full-service bookkeeping, and once it is set up properly in QuickBooks Online it holds together month after month.

If your deposits and your session totals have never agreed and you would like someone to sort it out with you, book a consultation with me and we will look at your reports together.