How to Reconcile Your Zeffy Payouts: A Step-by-Step Guide to Monthly Nonprofit Bookkeeping

This guide is based on the reconciliation process shared by David Ducharme — nonprofit treasurer, financial planner, and Zeffy user — during a live Zeffy webinar. David has served as treasurer of the Milton Hershey School Alumni Association for two years and uses this exact process every month.

Your Zeffy payout hits your bank account on schedule. The total is correct. But your bookkeeper needs to know: how much of that deposit is merchandise revenue, how much is unrestricted donations, and how much belongs to your youth program’s emergency fund?

The payout report tells you the “what.” This guide shows you how to get the “where” — a fully itemized, chart-of-accounts-ready breakdown that takes about 20 to 30 minutes per month using nothing but Excel or Google Sheets.

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What You’ll Need

• Access to your Zeffy dashboard (Finances and Payments tabs)

• Excel or Google Sheets

• Your organization’s chart of accounts (or a list of fund categories)

• About 20–30 minutes

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Step 1: Download Your Payout Report

Start in Zeffy by navigating to the Finances tab in the left-hand menu. You’ll see a list of all payouts your organization has received.

Click on the specific payout you want to reconcile to open the payout details page. Then click Export to download the report.

This payout report gives you the high-level view: each transaction included in the payout, the donor’s name, a transaction ID, and the total amount per transaction. What it doesn’t give you is the line-item detail — if a donor bought a t-shirt and added a $20 donation at checkout, you’ll see one total, not the breakdown.

Keep this file open. You’ll come back to it later to check for refunds.

Pro tip: Use Excel’s “select all → double-click column border” shortcut to auto-fit all column widths. It makes the data much easier to scan.

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Step 2: Download Your Itemized Payments Report

Now go to the Payments tab in Zeffy. This is where the detail lives.

Before exporting, set your date range wider than you think you need. If you’re reconciling a January 3rd payout, download data from November through January. Transactions that occurred in late November or December may have been included in this payout, and you want to catch everything.

Click Export in the top right corner. When prompted to choose your export type, select Itemized Payments — not the regular payments report. This is the version that breaks each transaction into individual line items (the t-shirt, the donation, the event ticket).

Select any additional fields relevant to your organization: donor contact info, custom questions, payment methods, etc.

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Step 3: Filter the Data in Your Spreadsheet

Open the itemized payments export in Excel or Google Sheets. Select the header row and add filters (in Excel: Data → Filter; in Google Sheets: Data → Create a filter).

Apply three filters in this order:

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Filter 1: Payment Method

Remove any payment methods that Zeffy doesn’t pay out. Deselect check, cash, and free transactions. These may exist in your data, but they weren’t part of the electronic payout you’re reconciling. If someone mailed you a check last month, it’s in your records but not in this deposit.

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Filter 2: Payout Date

Select only the payout date you’re reconciling. If you’re working on the January 4th payout, select only “1/4” (or however the date appears in your export). This is why you cast a wide net with your date range — the filter handles the precision.

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Filter 3: Canceled Tickets

Deselect any rows marked as canceled. This is especially important with recurring annual memberships, which can sometimes generate two entries: one canceled and one approved. Without removing the canceled entry, you’d count that amount twice.

After applying all three filters, your spreadsheet should show only the transactions that were included in this specific payout, with only the payment methods Zeffy processes, and no duplicate or canceled entries.

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Step 4: Clean and Consolidate Your Data

This is the step that makes the pivot table work. Your goal is to create two clean columns:

• One column with a title for every line item (what the money was for)

• One column with a dollar amount for every line item (how much)

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The challenge: donation forms and sales forms store data in different columns.

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For Sales Forms (Ticketing, Merchandise, Events)

These already have a rate title (the name of the item) and an item amount (the price). No changes needed.

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For Donation Forms

Donation forms don’t have a rate title or item amount because there’s no “item” being sold. Instead, you’ll see blank fields in those columns, with the dollar amount in the eligible amount column.

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Here’s how to fix it:

• 1. Filter the rate title column to show only blanks.

• 2. Look at the campaign title column for those rows — it will say something like “General Donation to Support the Alumni Association.”

• 3. Copy the campaign titles and paste them into the rate title column for those rows. Now every row has a name.

• 4. Do the same for amounts: copy the eligible amount into the item amount column for any rows where item amount is blank.

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For Auction Forms

Auction items have a unique issue: the item amount is the starting price, but the donor paid a different (usually higher) amount after bidding. Filter by the auction campaign name, then replace the item amount with the total amount paid so your numbers reflect actual revenue.

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Verify Your Total

Select all the values in your item amount column. Check the sum in the bottom-right corner of Excel (or use =SUM in Google Sheets). This number should match your Zeffy payout total exactly. In David’s example, the payout was $925, and the itemized total also came to $925.

If the numbers don’t match, you likely have a row with a missing amount or an extra row that should have been filtered out. Go back and check your filters.

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Step 5: Build a Pivot Table

Now that your data is clean, it’s time to summarize it. First, copy only the visible (filtered) data to a new sheet — this gives you a clean, uninterrupted list that the pivot table can work with.

• 1. Select all visible data in your filtered sheet (Ctrl+A or Cmd+A).

• 2. Copy it (Ctrl+C / Cmd+C).

• 3. Create a new sheet tab at the bottom of your workbook.

• 4. Paste (Ctrl+V / Cmd+V). You should see a clean, continuous list with no hidden rows.

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Create the Pivot Table

• 1. Select all the data on your new clean sheet.

• 2. Go to Insert → Pivot Table.

• 3. Keep the default setting to place it on a new worksheet.

• 4. In the pivot table field list on the right side of your screen, select fields in this order:
  • Campaign Title (this becomes your top-level grouping)
  • Rate Title (this nests under each campaign)
  • Item Amount (this goes into the Values area)

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Important: The order you select fields matters. Campaign title should be the outermost “Russian doll,” with rate titles nested inside it. If the hierarchy looks wrong, drag the fields to reorder them in the Rows area.

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Check the Value Calculation

By default, the pivot table may count items instead of summing them. If you see “Count of Item Amount” instead of “Sum of Item Amount”:

• 1. Click the dropdown arrow next to the field in the Values area.

• 2. Select Value Field Settings.

• 3. Change from “Count” to “Sum.”

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You now have a complete breakdown of your payout organized by campaign and line item.

Bonus: If you want to see how many of each item sold (not just the dollar total), drag Payment Method into the Values area. It will count the number of transactions, which you can rename to “Quantity.”

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Step 6: Check for Refunds

Go back to the payout report you downloaded in Step 1. Add a filter and sort the amount column from largest to smallest — or filter for negative amounts.

If there are no negative amounts, you have no refunds to worry about.

If you do see a negative amount, that’s a refund that was deducted from this payout. Since refunds don’t appear in the itemized payments export, you need to manually add this as a line item in your reconciliation. Note the amount, the transaction it relates to, and the fund or campaign it should be deducted from.

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Step 7: Map to Your Chart of Accounts

This is the “last mile” — translating your pivot table into your accounting system’s language.

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Create a small table next to your pivot table with two columns:

• Revenue account (from your chart of accounts)

• Classification or restriction (unrestricted, temporarily restricted, specific fund names, etc.)

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Go through each line in your pivot table and map it:

• A custom license plate sale for $75 → Merchandise Revenue, Parent Organization

• An additional donation of $50 at checkout → Unrestricted Donation Revenue

• Annual membership dues of $170 → Membership Dues, General Fund

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David recommends color-coding each row as you map it — once everything is highlighted, you know every dollar is accounted for. Your mapped totals should equal the payout total.

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“When your totals all add up and everything is color-coded, you know you’re good to go. This will make any bookkeeper very happy.” — David Ducharme

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Make It Repeatable

The first time through this process will take the longest — maybe 45 minutes to an hour as you figure out your filters and build your chart-of-accounts template. After that, David estimates 20 to 30 minutes per month.

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To speed things up even more:

• Save your template. Create a master spreadsheet with your chart of accounts and classification table already built. Copy it each month and paste in new data.

• Keep your filters consistent. The same three filters (payment method, payout date, canceled tickets) apply every time.

• Reconcile monthly, not quarterly. It’s faster to reconcile one payout at a time than to untangle three months of data.

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Beyond Manual: Automation Options

If 20 minutes a month is still more than you’d like to spend, David shared that his organization has automated parts of this process using Excel’s built-in VBA and Power Query features. They drop the two Zeffy export files into a designated folder, click “run,” and get the summarized output in about 30 seconds.

For organizations processing thousands of transactions monthly, a more advanced Zapier-to-QuickBooks integration is also possible — though David noted that managing the automation can sometimes require as much effort as doing the work manually. The right level of automation depends on your transaction volume and how often new campaigns are created.

Zeffy is planning a follow-up webinar specifically on automation approaches. Stay tuned for details.

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Coming Soon: Fund Designation in Zeffy

Zeffy announced a new fund designation feature arriving in early-to-mid March 2026. This feature will let donors choose which fund to support directly on donation forms, or let organizations associate a form with a specific fund on the back end. Fund designations will be included in your reporting, making it even easier to see how donations should be allocated without the manual reconciliation steps.

Frequently Asked Questions

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David Ducharme is a board member and treasurer of the Milton Hershey School Alumni Association and the owner of an investment management and financial planning firm. This guide is based on his presentation during a Zeffy webinar on understanding your payouts.

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