Before you start: work on a copy. Save the downloaded file under a new name ("payout-november-WORKING") and fix the copy. Your original download is your evidence; your working file is your scratch paper. Every fix below assumes you're in the copy.
Problem 1: Dates in three formats in the same column
What it looks like
One column reads 11/02/2026 on one row, 2026-11-02 on the next, and "Nov 2" further down. It happens when exports from different months (or different platforms) get combined, and when some rows were typed or pasted by a human.
Why it hurts
Your spreadsheet can only sort and filter real dates. Mixed formats mean November's sales scatter across the year, monthly totals quietly include the wrong rows, and most bookkeeping software imports the text-look ones as blank or errors.
The fix
Select the date column and use Find & Replace plus your spreadsheet's DATEVALUE (Excel/Sheets) or Text-to-Columns date setting to convert every entry to a real date, then apply one display format (we use YYYY-MM-DD) to the whole column. Test it: sort the column. If anything lands out of order, that row is still text — find it and convert it. This is the single highest-value fix on this page; do it first.
Problem 2: Money stored as text
What it looks like
Amounts show up as "$1,240.00" or "1,240.00 USD" — with the dollar sign, commas, or currency letters baked into the cell. The tell: you add a total at the bottom and it comes out blank, zero, or way too small, because the spreadsheet is treating those cells as words, not numbers.
Why it hurts
Text money doesn't add, sort, or import. A month of payouts can "total" to a fraction of what you actually received, and the error is silent — nothing looks broken, the number is just wrong.
The fix
In your working copy: select the amount column, Find & Replace "$", ",", and " USD" away (replace each with nothing), then use VALUE() or Paste Special → Multiply by 1 to convert the cleaned text to real numbers. Apply a currency or two-decimal number format afterward for looks — formatting is the paint, the number underneath is the value. Then re-total and compare against the payout total on the platform's own summary page. They should agree to the penny; if they don't, Problem 4 is probably also in the file.
Problem 3: Merged cells and welded columns
What it looks like
Two pieces of information sharing one cell — "Blue Mug – Large" as a single title-and-variant entry, or an order ID and a date side by side in one box. Statement PDFs converted carelessly are the worst offenders, and formatted reports love merging header cells across columns.
Why it hurts
You can't sort by variant if the variant is glued to the title. You can't match rows between two files if the matching key is welded to something else. And merged header cells make most importers read the columns shifted one over — the classic "all my numbers are in the wrong column" import.
The fix
Unmerge everything first (select all → Unmerge Cells; nothing of value is lost, the text stays in the top-left cell). For welded text like "Blue Mug – Large," add two new columns and split on the separator with Text to Columns (Excel) or SPLIT() (Sheets). Pick the separator the export actually used — usually " – ", " | ", or " / " — and spot-check ten rows before trusting the split.
Problem 4: Duplicate rows
What it looks like
The same payout, order, or transaction appears twice — usually because two monthly exports overlapped by a few days, or a "corrected" file got combined with the original instead of replacing it.
Why it hurts
Duplicates inflate your income and your fees in exactly the same shape, so the file still looks balanced while being wrong. They are also the problem your future self will never find at tax time, because nothing in the totals looks off.
The fix
Sort by the transaction or order ID, then by amount and date, and use Conditional Formatting → Highlight Duplicate Values on the ID column to see the pairs. Then — this matters — flag, don't delete: add a column called "Possible duplicate?" and mark the second copy. Two identical amounts on the same day are sometimes two real sales, and a deleted real sale is a worse error than a flagged duplicate. Delete only when the ID, date, amount, and item all match and you know the two exports overlapped.
Problem 5: Fees hiding in the wrong column
What it looks like
The export shows one amount column, and the fees have already been subtracted inside it — or worse, fee rows are listed as negative amounts mixed in among the sales, so your "sales" column contains both money in and money out.
Why it hurts
Your books end up showing smaller sales and invisible fees. You lose the two most useful numbers a seller has — what you actually sold, and what the platform actually charged you — and any profit calculation built on the file is wrong in a way that's hard to even describe to your tax preparer.
The fix
Rebuild three columns: Gross (what the buyer paid), Fees (what the platform took, as a positive number in its own column), and Net (Gross − Fees, as a formula). If fee rows exist as separate negative lines, move them into the Fees column against the sale they belong to. Check your work: Gross − Fees should equal the deposit that actually hit your bank. When it does, your file finally tells the truth in a shape your books can use.
The honest part: when DIY stops making sense
Each fix above is genuinely doable by hand, and for one file, once, it's an evening well spent — you'll know your own numbers better afterward. The math changes when the same five problems come back every month, in three different file shapes, from three different platforms. That's not a knowledge problem anymore; it's an hours problem, and hours are the thing a shop owner is shortest on.
That's the job our spreadsheet cleanup service exists for: you send the month's files exactly as they download — CSV, Excel, even PDF statements — and get back one clean spreadsheet in one consistent format, with a short note on everything that was changed. One-off batches are $79; a standing monthly tidy is $49/mo and is built as the on-ramp to our seller bookkeeping service when you're ready to hand over the books entirely. If you fix this month's file yourself using the guide above and it goes fine — genuinely, good. Save this page for the month it doesn't.
What this guide is — and isn't
This page is general information about file formats and spreadsheet technique. It is not bookkeeping or tax advice, and following it doesn't make a file tax-ready — it makes the file clean, which is a different and earlier thing. A cleaned file can still contain a wrong figure from the platform, and deciding what your numbers mean for your books or your taxes is your bookkeeper's or tax preparer's job. If a row in your export looks wrong — not badly formatted, but wrong — don't fix the number yourself; ask the platform, with the original file as your evidence. That's the other reason you always work on a copy.
See the cleanup service
Or email inunghwang@gmail.com with the subject CLEANUP + your shop name and tell us where your files come from.