The deposit is a summary. The statement is the sale.
Steam, the console storefronts and the mobile app stores all pay net. If the bookkeeping starts at the deposit, revenue is understated, the platform's revenue share never appears as a cost, and nobody can say what a title actually earned. Studios that later assemble a credit claim or answer a publisher's royalty query end up reverse-engineering their own sales from payout PDFs. We book from the platform statement instead, so each deposit unpacks into its parts:
| What the deposit nets out | Where it belongs in your books |
|---|---|
| Gross sales at the storefront | Revenue, converted at the transaction-period rate |
| The platform's revenue share | Its own expense line — a real cost, not an invisible haircut |
| Refunds and chargebacks | Contra-revenue, tracked by title |
| Sales taxes the platform collected abroad | Stripped out — neither your revenue nor your expense |
| Currency conversion on the payout | Exchange gain or loss, kept out of your margin |
Console and mobile statements arrive on different cycles, in different currencies, with different reserve and threshold rules — some storefronts hold a payment until a minimum balance accrues, which means revenue earned in March can surface as cash in June. A monthly close that reconciles each statement to its eventual deposit is the only way three storefronts become one trustworthy revenue figure.
The same discipline applies on the cost side. A studio with a shipped game, a live-ops tail and a new project in production needs the ledger split by title from the start — payroll allocated by who worked on what, contractor invoices tagged to a project, shared overhead sitting in its own bucket. We set this up with classes and tags in QuickBooks Online so it happens at entry, not in a year-end spreadsheet. Per-title costing is what makes three later conversations possible: what the last game really returned, what the next one is really burning, and which labour belongs to which credit claim.
Publisher money is a liability until the game earns it
A recoupable advance is not revenue on the day it lands. It sits on the balance sheet as an obligation and is worked off as milestones are accepted or royalties accrue against recoupment — and the books should show the unearned balance at any moment, because that number drives both the publisher relationship and the tax treatment of what you have received. We keep a recoupment schedule beside the ledger, reconciled to every royalty statement, so when the game crosses into overage you know the month it happened. The tax side of holding money you have not yet earned is its own topic, covered on our game studio tax filing page.
Early access and DLC: sold now, earned as delivered
An early-access purchase includes a promise — the 1.0 release — and a founder pack or season pass includes several. Recognizing all of it as revenue on the day of sale flatters this year and starves the launch year, and it muddies any conversation with an investor about what the game genuinely earns. We set a recognition policy once, in writing: what is earned at sale (a finished DLC drop, a cosmetic), what is deferred against delivery, and how the deferral releases. Applied consistently, it also produces the deferred-revenue schedule the tax filings lean on.
Contract artists, tagged for the slips and the credit
Studios buy a lot of art, audio and QA from freelancers, and the ledger should capture two facts about every one of them at entry: where they are resident, and whether they are incorporated. Unincorporated Canadian contractors paid fees for services get a T4A from you by the end of February. Ontario-resident arm's-length contractors can also count toward the eligible labour behind Ontario's interactive digital media credit — while an artist invoicing from abroad cannot — so residency tagged at the moment of payment saves a painful reconstruction at claim time (the claim itself is planned on our tax planning page). For contractors abroad, remote work performed outside Canada generally raises no Canadian slip, but keep the contracts and invoices; withholding questions arise only when services are physically rendered in Canada, and they are worth professional attention when they do.
One roof: books, payroll, statements, filings
Payroll is a studio's largest cost and the base of its credit claims, which makes payroll records that can survive an Ontario Creates review part of the accounting job, not an afterthought. Our End-to-End Accounting service runs the whole cycle under one engagement: monthly close on QuickBooks Online with Dext capturing the receipts, payroll for the team, quarterly statements a publisher or investor can read, and the corporate tax and HST filings built from the same ledger. For studios around Mississauga and the GTA we start with a free 15-minute discovery call and quote the engagement in writing — no hourly surprises mid-production.
