I have 2 trading styles as a sole trader. I want to keep GC & Stripe as payment options for both accounts but I only need the transactions for that particular account to be imported into it.
As GC & Stripe only import transactions initiated by QF does this mean they will skip any transactions not initiated by their own QF account automatically or will they pull in all QF transactions from both accounts?
Hi @Lurch, they will pull in transactions from the respective accounts only.
Neither GC or Stripe have any automated import process. So only invoices paid on each respective QF account will log anything to the associated merchant accounts. Any GC or Stripe activity outside of QF is not accessible to your QF account.
With Stripe you can have the transactions feed in via Zapier, I’ve not really had a chance yet to explore the fields that you can map for this, so I don’t know if there’s a field that would identify which trading style the payment belongs to.
OK, I think I’ve got my head around the workflow here.
The only issue I can see currently is that I would want to tag the payment on the bank account from GC/Stripe to the relevant merchant account to balance everything up but the bank account is in QF 1 and the GC/Stripe accounts are in QF2. I could get around this by creating a ‘Trading Style 2’ current account in QF 1 and ‘Trading Style 1’ in QF 2 to use as a dummy intermediary.
I could probably use Zapier to do this in the future if direct linking of 2 trading styles is not going to be something that becomes available, so effectively in double entry speak a Dr on one account will fire off the request to make the matching Cr on the other. I’d still need 2 dummy accounts for this though.
If both trading styles are under a sole trader umbrella then you would need a dummy current account in each QF account. You then just record only the activity that relates to that trading style and delete everything else, it would leave you with only a partial view of your bank in each QF account. But with a sole trader, getting an accurate P&L is more important than the balance sheet, getting an accurate balance sheet for any sole trader is not a simple task and in most cases not worth the effort.
Is it not possible to get a second Stripe and GC account for the other trading style? This would solve a lot of the accounting headaches and I don’t believe their would be a cost implication to that as neither levy monthly fees.
I was actually using the same account for both as I wanted to use the current account on the main account only for simplicity. This should be the easiest way to reconcile everything and also have a clear audit trail I think. Having half the current account on one account and the rest on another will be a nightmare, especially as I use Barclays so this would defeat the point of the automatic feed if I have to manually filter and edit everything.
I did consider setting up a second GC & Stripe account for the second trading style but then this still wouldn’t really solve the problem as the money still ends up in the same place, i.e. my single business account that is used for all trading styles.
The only downside is that tagging invoices as paid is not necessarily accurate, although I think this might be an issue even if I did it under a single trading style. Say I have 20 customers each paying a £5 DD per month. If I only receive £94 who do I mark as not paid? I’m assuming I’d have to look through my GC account and manually track down the missing payment?
There’s no simple solution here I’m afraid, multiple trading styles with shared bank accounts is a pain to reconcile. Long term this problem will likely be solved by configurable trading styles within a single QuickFile account, unfortunately it may not be something we can look at until the back end of 2015, early 2016. There’s quite a lot of work involved to get this right.
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