You invoiced a hundred thousand, the client says they paid a hundred thousand, and ninety four thousand landed in the account. Nobody warned you, there is no email explaining anything, and the entry that shows up in the statement carries an acronym you have never seen.
You were not underpaid and no commission was deducted. You were withheld, which is different: you paid a tax in advance that you will be able to use later. The problem is that if you do not know which one, you will never use it.
Not every deduction is the same
Before working out what to do, you have to know what happened. There are at least four different things that look alike on a statement and are resolved differently.
| What appears | Who applies it | What it actually is |
|---|---|---|
| Withholding of a provincial tax | the client or an intermediary, under a jurisdiction's regime | a payment on account of yours, recoverable |
| A collection surcharge | whoever sells to you or bills you | another payment on account, also creditable |
| Withholding on a bank credit | the institution, under a collection regime | payment on account of the provincial tax |
| Platform or payment provider commission | the intermediary, for its service | a cost, not recoverable |
| A discount agreed with the client | the client | a lower price, and it should be on the invoice |
By contrast with a commission, which is money gone and booked as an expense, a withholding is your money sitting in advance. Confusing them is the mistake that makes a creator pay the same tax twice.
What an intermediary withholds is not its own decision
It is worth dismantling a widespread idea here: that wallets and payment platforms "deduct taxes" arbitrarily, or because it suits them.
Collection regimes are provincial
Jurisdictions establish regimes under which certain parties must act as collection agents on particular payments or credits. An institution operating in that jurisdiction does not choose whether to apply them: it is required to.
There are also systems administered jointly between jurisdictions, coordinated within the Comisión Arbitral, and they do not all work the same way or reach the same parties. Which one applies to you depends on your situation and the jurisdiction, not on the app's logo.
What determines how much is withheld is you
This is the part most underestimated. The rate applied to you usually depends on your own position: whether you are registered where you should be, under which regime, and whether you appear correctly in the jurisdiction's registers.
From which comes an effect that looks unfair and has an explanation: two creators charging the same through the same channel can receive different amounts. Almost always the difference is not in the platform, it is in each one's tax position.
What is not a tax withholding
A fee for processing the payment, an international transfer cost, an exchange difference or a discount for early settlement are not withholdings. They are not recovered, they are not credited against any tax and there is no procedure to follow: they are the price of the service.
Telling them apart matters because the treatment is opposite. One comes off the tax, the other comes off the result.
The mistake of treating it as a cost
Many creators do the arithmetic backwards: if ninety four arrive out of a hundred, they assume they earn ninety four and raise their price to compensate.
It is an expensive mistake for two reasons. The first is that those six are a credit in your favour, and not using it means giving it to a jurisdiction. The second is that raising your price to offset a withholding makes you more expensive than the competition for a reason that is not real.
The right move is to credit the withholding where it belongs, depending on the tax involved, and for that you need the certificates.
What to do, in order
- Identify the acronym on the entry. It is the fact that tells you which regime it is, and without it nothing can be done.
- Download and keep the certificates, month by month. Intermediaries make them available and often only for a while.
- Check your position in the jurisdiction. If you are being withheld at a high rate, the most frequent cause is an outdated register entry or a missing registration.
- Credit the balances where applicable, and if they pile up, find out your jurisdiction's procedure for requesting a reduction.
Point three returns the most money per hour invested. It is also the one almost nobody does, because it means going into the provincial authority's site rather than the app you get paid in, which is where you naturally look.
When your client is the one withholding
So far we have talked about payment intermediaries, because they show up first. But the case that moves the most money is another: the company hiring you acts as a collection agent itself and pays your invoice with a part withheld.
Three things change compared with the previous case, and they are worth knowing before it happens.
The first is that the certificate has to come from your client, not from an app. If it does not arrive, you ask, and you ask at the time, because afterwards it drifts between one payments team and another for weeks.
The second is that the withholding shows up on the payment order and not always on the bank statement, so reconciling by looking only at the account is not enough. The invoice says a hundred, the bank says ninety four, and the paper explaining the difference sits in the client's administrative circuit.
The third is that this kind of withholding is usually tied to your position in the jurisdiction's register, just like the previous one. A large client withholding at a high rate is not being harsh: it is applying what the register says about you.
Which is why, when the first corporate client appears, it pays to send your registration certificate and your position in the jurisdiction ahead of time, along with the first invoice. It is one email, and it avoids the miscalculated withholding you then have to recover.
When this stops being a minor matter
While you invoice little and to few clients, the amounts withheld are small and can be ignored without serious consequences. That stops being true at three specific moments, and it is worth recognising them before they arrive.
When you start getting paid electronically on a regular basis, because credits become systematic. When your first large client appears, because mid sized companies often act as agents. And when you invoice into more than one jurisdiction, because that is when the position becomes genuinely yours and not the intermediary's.
The objection you hear is that the accountant handles all of this and there is no need to understand it. It is true that they handle it, and equally true that they cannot handle what they cannot see: certificates not downloaded in time and withholdings nobody identified are work that cannot be done later.
There is a small routine that prevents almost the whole problem and requires understanding no regime at all. Once a month, on the same day you review what came in, you go into each payment channel you use and download that period's certificates into a folder named after the month. Ten minutes.
What that routine produces is not administrative tidiness: it is that the credit exists when it is needed. The difference between a creator who recovers their withholdings and one who does not is almost never tax knowledge, it is whether the receipts showed up on the day they were asked for.
Sources
Checked on 12 September 2026. This guide is not tax advice. Collection regimes are a matter for each jurisdiction and change often: verify which one applies to you with the relevant authority.
