I’m pretty new to this so trying to get my head around a few things! I use the banking feed to maintain my account tagging income to invoices. Clients can either pay via bank transfer, or via pay pal/ stripe making use of QuickFiles integration.
However when I receive a payment via Stripe/ Pay Pal the income doesn’t match the invoice due to the fees Pay Pal/ Stripe charge.
I addition as I’ve these integrated into my feed I get the tag option coming up for the Stripe/ Pay Pal income then a little later (a lot later in the case of Stripe!) the bank feed also logs the payment so basically double accounting.
How have you set up the PayPal & Stripe integrations? Each provider should have its own merchant “bank account” in QuickFile, with the integration set up to deposit payments to the merchant account, not the current account.
For PayPal/Stripe payments the “payment from customer” happens at the point where they make the PayPal/Stripe transaction and the money appears in the corresponding merchant account in QuickFile. When the (slightly less) money arrives in your current account it is not another payment from a customer, it’s simply a bank transfer from the merchant account to move the money that already belongs to your business.
This transfer leaves the fee that Stripe/PayPal charged you as part of the merchant account balance so you then need to separately account for these fees as a purchase from the payment provider. You can either do this on a transaction by transaction basis or in bulk once a week/month/whatever.
For Stripe in particular they actually send you a monthly invoice detailing their total fees for the month, so for Stripe the best way to work is to ignore the fees completely from day to day and then just make a once a month purchase, paid from the Stripe holding account, based on what they invoice you at the end of the month. And if you’re VAT registered then the Stripe invoice states that you should apply the reverse charge.
When setting this up under Banking/ Merchant and Online… / Bank Feeds setting QuickFile suggest when the Enable automated feed is checked (if I’m reading this correctly) the feed into my Banking tab should take into account fees etc.
I reconcile by clicking on t Banking and then All Banking, in which I see the Stipe payment (less the transaction fee) then several days later the transfer coming up from the bank account, so basically twice. Do people just delete one of these transactions so everything balances?
The PayPal setup should be depositing payments to your PayPal account, not your current account. This would mean that when you receive payments for QuickFile invoices through PayPal they would show up pre-tagged in the PayPal merchant account, and when the money lands in your current account you’d just tag that as a bank transfer.
Aside from that, you should almost certainly disable that 2% handling fee on both payment types - you are not allowed to charge different amounts on B2C sales purely because the customer chose to use a different payment type. Surcharges like this are technically still allowed on some B2B sales but if you’re not sure that your customers are businesses rather than consumers then you’re on shaky ground if you apply a surcharge.
