One launch, three kinds of money
Open-cart week ends with a number on the Stripe dashboard, and that number is at least three different things. Pay-in-full buyers are cash for a program you have not delivered yet. Payment-plan buyers are a first instalment plus a receivable that will take four or six months to collect, if it fully collects. And everything inside your refund or guarantee window is money you may be handing back before the books ever call it income.
So we split the launch on day one. Each enrolment posts at full program price, plan balances go into a receivable ledger with a schedule per student, refund-window sales are watched until the window closes, and undelivered program value sits as a liability until you teach it. That is the only version of the books that can tell you what a launch actually earned, and it is the version a lender or a future buyer of the business will insist on.
Gross sales first; the processor's cut is an expense
Stripe and PayPal deposit net of processing fees, and books built from bank deposits quietly understate both revenue and costs. That is not cosmetic. Your HST is owed on what you charged the student, not on what the processor forwarded, and the $30,000 small-supplier test looks at gross taxable sales, so a coach watching net deposits can sail past the registration threshold without noticing. Refunds and chargebacks hide inside net deposits too, which makes your real refund rate invisible.
We rebuild gross from the platform's own reports, and Kajabi, Thinkific, Teachable and ThriveCart all export what we need. Processing fees get their own expense line, refunds get theirs, and the whole thing ties back to the bank every month. When the registration question does arrive, the timing rules are covered on our coach tax services page.
Cohort revenue is earned across delivery, not at the deposit
An eight-week program sold in March and taught through April and May is not March income, however the cash arrived. Here is one student on a three-payment plan for a $3,000 program delivered over April and May:
| Month | Cash collected | Revenue earned | Deferred balance at month-end |
|---|---|---|---|
| March (enrolment) | $1,000 | $0 | $1,000 |
| April (weeks 1 to 4) | $1,000 | $1,500 | $500 |
| May (weeks 5 to 8) | $1,000 | $1,500 | $0 |
Multiply that by every student and every cohort and you have the deferred revenue schedule we roll forward monthly. It matters most when a cohort straddles your year-end: amounts collected for coaching you have not yet delivered can be recognized with the delivery rather than the deposit, and that is a real difference on the tax return when it is supported by working papers instead of assembled after the fact.
When an instalment buyer stops paying
Every payment-plan business eventually meets the buyer who disappears at instalment three of six. The books need a defined path for that moment: the failed charge flagged the week it happens, the retry attempts logged, and, once collection is genuinely dead, a write-off recorded against the receivable rather than a quiet deletion of the student. Your bad-debt history also becomes the honest input for pricing future payment plans, which is a decision we treat properly in our CFO work for coaches.
There is a tax payoff to the discipline. If you remitted HST on the full program price and later write off the uncollected balance as a bad debt, GST/HST rules allow an adjustment to recover the tax on what you never received, but only when the write-off is documented in the records. Sloppy books forfeit that recovery.
The contractor bench and a close sized for a coach
Most coaching businesses run on contractors: a VA, a video editor, a funnel builder, appointment setters paid partly on commission. We code every contractor payment as it happens, so February slip season is a report rather than an archaeology project; who actually belongs on a T4A, and why your overseas VA usually does not, is covered with the filings on the tax side.
The monthly close itself stays deliberately small: platform reports reconciled to the bank, the deferred revenue schedule rolled forward, plan receivables aged, contractor and software costs categorized, and an HST balance you can trust before the filing deadline. All of it is delivered inside End-to-End Accounting, with bookkeeping, payroll, financial reporting and tax filing under one roof, quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call. Coaches earlier in the arc, before there is much to reconcile, often start with CPA Quick Support at $99/month and move up when the first serious launch lands.
