Not everyone is a Stripe accountant!

Stripe describes itself as a payment services infrastructure for online businesses.

Stripe in brief

Enterprise, infrastructure, heavyweight in online transaction management, toolbox for managing your business, unlimited scalable offer...

Their expertise lies in creating specialised tools to facilitate and increase the number of successful transactions. To do this they use their huge database and make it available to your company's ecosystem(Quickbooks, Qonto, Pennylane...).

Stripe offers its customers a bundled package of banking services and support with relevant advice tailored to your business and the issues that impact your profitability.

Management tools

Infrastructure is really the right word, it's a factory of APIs, some better than others, they cover such a wide spectrum of services that they are much more efficient than online and traditional banks.

API: This part of the application is essential to understand the service to entrepreneurs that this tool enables. Each tool is accessible by the client and implementable in their application or website through API integration and all APIs are included as standard.

Invoicing: This API is the fastest way to manage your customers' recurring or one-off invoices in any currency and any part of the world. The application also supports many additional features (coupons, free trials, prorates, overages, etc.).

Subscription: setting up subscriptions is ultra simple and fully integrated. Card, bank transfer, multiple currencies, your revenues are guaranteed to feed your cash flow and the invoice is sent directly to your customer. No loss of time or business due to late payment.

Climate: allows you to donate 1% of your transactions to the planet, so that you and many other companies can help save our species.

Payout: request payment of your funds from your Stripe wallet to your bank. (Online banking is better for the planet and for us: Qonto, Shine...). Payout is a service that can be configured to occur monthly, weekly or as often as you like, on a per click basis.

‍

‍

Posting Stripe payment flows

We can't tell you everything about accounting for bank data flows in line with your bank statements here, just know that for an accounting firm, accounting for Stripe flows is the closest thing to Koh-Lanta of matching numbers.

Basically, Stripe records the transactions that come into your Stripe accounts, deducting fees automatically from what is collected.

Let's take an example: you invoice your customer for a service for an amount of €100 including tax, Stripe applies its commission of 2.5% + €0.25 cents, which leaves a sum of €97.25 including tax.

Except that the amount before tax is calculated on the amount including tax before Stripe's commission, so if you ask for a Payout, it will be €97.25 including tax and €81.12 excluding tax, whereas on the invoices the amount excluding tax will be written as €83.33.

In itself, this is not serious, in reality it is a calamity for us accountants, since no invoice issued matches either the amounts in Stripe or the payments in the bank.

Worse still, the sums are not directly transferred to your bank account, you have to make "Payouts" whose frequency you can set, and these Payouts are a sum of money regrouping all the payments made by the customers to which Stripe's fees have been subtracted and which are not separated by geography.

‍

To explain the service in more detail, a Stripe Payout is:
A global sum of payments for a given period
Payments from which Stripe fees are automatically deducted and which do not correspond to any invoice.
Payments that are not geographically separated during the payout and for which it is sometimes difficult to trace the origin of the payment, and therefore VAT has to be calculated on unknown bases.

‍

Conclusion

Now that you know that, you know that you shouldn't trust your company's accounting to just anyone... Especially if you use Stripe.

We'll even give you our secret...

A Stripe can be finely tuned by accountants who know about VAT, collection thresholds, collection exports or "bank" type exports.

To use Stripe unlimited, it's simple, ask Blendy your Stripe certified digital accountant to set it up for your accounting and grow tenfold without worrying about your cash receipts.

‍

‍