I have just integrated my existing Stripe account to Quickfile. I read up on the entire merchant account tagging thing and it seems perfectly clear. Except, maybe my case is a bit off but here’s my problem.
Our stripe account has transactions coming in from another system along with the new Quickfile integration. So yesterday, when a customer cleared a £400 invoice on quickfile using stripe, I can see that the invoice is paid, the Stripe holding account is showing £400 and my Stripe account also shows the updated details. But, because our Stripe account accepts incoming transactions from our website as well, I can see that the next scheduled Stripe transfer is more than £400, ie, say £425.00. When I import this transaction from the bank during my regular account update, I won’t be able to tag the full £425 as coming from the merchant account.
TL;DR : If the merchant account has £x, and the stripe account accumulates multiple quickfile and non quickfile payments and when i import the bank statement it shows a total import of £x+y, how do i tag this transaction from Stripe in my current account? Would really appreciate the response.
Our Stripe integration at the moment is limited to just “Stripe as a payment option”, it doesn’t have any feed or sync capabilities. Any payments collected via Stripe outside of QuickFile will need to be manually entered for now, or uploaded from a spreadsheet.
Personally I would go and just enter one bulk transaction, every week/month to represent all sales made outside of QF and log that to a single invoice (client: bulk Stripe sales).
We are doing a lot of work with Zapier at the moment, which will allow you to sync QuickFile with 100s of other 3rd party apps (Stripe Included). You can follow the Zapier thread here.
I meant my problem is with manual import of feed, and I’m not looking for any sync capabilities either.
I upload bank statements manually every week/biweekly and I tag all transactions that Stripe makes to my bank account manually. Stripe accumulates all payments, so it’s not possible to individually select payments into the system. So the transaction I was talking about, £400 - the invoice was raised in QF and the client paid online(using the Stripe integration) so I can see the money in the Stripe account, already cumulated with other payments (hence about £425 due for the next transfer, not just £400 for this invoice).
QF shows the invoice paid and an amount of £400 is attributed to the Stripe holding account automatically.
The problem is : When I import the statement next, the payment will show up as £425 from Stripe (out of which £400 is for the QF payment). how do i tag the whole £425 as a transfer from the merchant account then? That would mess up the calculations no? If I had a separate Stripe account just for QF, that might have created less issues but my main business account is linked to QF now. So what do I do when I import the bank statement manually?
The £425 received to your current account must be tagged as a transfer from the Stripe merchant account, this would obviously throw your Stripe account into the red by £25. You need to account for all Stripe activity whether initiated in QF or elsewhere. For that reason that £25 “money in” entry must also be added to the Stripe merchant account and tagged to it’s own invoice.
Thank you so much for your patience and your replies. I understand that we have a somewhat difficult system in house.
What happens if I tag the total £425 (as uploaded from the bank statement) as I would normally do for the weekly transactions from Stripe (under General Sales) and let the Stripe holding account unaccounted for? So what i’m suggesting is, in my case, the £425(which btw, would be anyway lesser than the original invoice simply because of Stripe’s 2.4%+20p transaction charge) is tagged normally and the holding account isn’t touched and keeps accumulating (and hence keeps a tag of) all the invoices which have been paid through QF? Does the Stripe holding account mess up my normal chart of accounts?
What are you actually using Quickfile for? Really the holding account needs to be balanced and everything accounting for if you are submitting tax returns and using it as your main accounting system. If you are running multiple systems and not using QF as the main package then I would assume that any untagged and unexplained balances in QF would just be ignored by your other system as these untagged balances will already be accounted for there. If this is the case you could just ignore anything that you want to and leave it in whatever state you want. This does however pretty much defeat the point of using Quickfile in the first place though.
I use QF as my main accounting system, however, I do have an accountant who uses the data to prepare a separate tax and VAT return.
We usually have all payments taking place on our website, with the transactions going directly into Stripe. Stripe releases accumulated amounts (After deducting its fees) on a weekly basis which can be tagged simply under General sales.
i decided to give the Stripe integration a shot, since it promised the possibility of getting paid directly rather than the customer having to transfer money to the bank account (which was the system earlier). So I did it for a particular customer, and then I realised that tagging amounts directly to the merchant account isn’t going to work, so asked for your advice. I’m no accountant, but have been a faithful QF user for the last two years for my company and simple bookkeeping
I don’t see anything unique about your setup here, it’s actually very common and a process that many businesses need to handle.
You can’t really tag the entry on your bank directly to a sales invoice (I think that’s what you were querying?) as you have a fee component you need to account for.
The best thing to do is think of Stripe as a separate bank account, when someone pays you on Stripe they pay the gross value of that sale into the Stripe account. Later when Stripe send you the lump sum (maybe for several invoices), it’s just a transfer from the Stripe account to your current account. Stripe also charge your for their services and most likely pay you NET of their charges, so you also need to enter those charges on the Stripe account (money out, tagged to a purchase invoice).
With the money coming into Stripe, the charges and the transfer to your current account the account should settle back at zero.
We’ve tried to document this process best we can in the following guide:
So in my case, we get paid on the website (via Stripe) and also have some customers paying through QF (through invoices raised for a particular order). If they were all paying through invoices and QF, I can understand how that system should work. In our case, we also have general sales through Stripe(via the website), which I tag individually when I upload biweekly bank statements (on the current account).
QF is only made aware of the sales from the website when the bank statements are uploaded to the current account. There are no pre-raised sales invoices for these transactions. We sell software products where people come to the website, and buy a product hence there’s no pre-invoice system at all. The invoices and automatic purchase orders are created when I tag the bank statement directly. Only in some of the cases, when the invoices for a particular bespoke order or service is raised, I make it a point to raise it through quickfile first, and usually the customer pays in directly to the bank account which again has been taking care of the problem so far. It’s only with this new Stripe integration that I’m totally back to the basics (since whatever accounting I have learned is through QF!)
Sorry for sounding like a total noob, but I would like to understand how to deal with this process better
That article talks about entering transactions in the merchant account manually. Now I didn’t have to create or enter anything manually at all in the Stripe holding account. I simply enabled the integration, created an invoice for the client and the client paid using his cc, directly through QF. The merchant account has automatically tagged that invoice and marked it as paid.
Next week, when I upload the bank statement and the £425 amount appears, my main question is…what do I do with that, on the current account. It is not possible for me to manually create an invoice in the merchant account whenever someone makes a purchase on the website, that’s far too much overhead and I would rather not use the integration and go back to accepting payment directly to the bank account through BACS. Would really appreciate your insight on this. Apologies again if I’m missing something basic.
In both cases what you need to enter into QF to get the amounts right would be
the gross amounts of all sales (before deduction of stripe fees) as “sales invoices” in QuickFile, with payment into the Stripe merchant account
payments from Stripe to your bank as bank transfers
stripe fees as purchases paid from the merchant account.
It sounds like what you’ve been doing so far is entering the web sales into QuickFile as a sales invoice for the net amount after Stripe fees have been deducted. Although this gives the same bottom line on your P&L it’s not strictly accurate as it understates both turnover and overheads (the fees should be an overhead rather than just foregone income).
You’d have to work from your Stripe transaction log, you don’t have to put every transaction in as an individual purchase but instead just total up all your web payments for a particular day/week into one invoice which you immediately mark as paid into the merchant account.
Thanks a lot! That seems like a sensible plan of action. So far it has been easier to just tag the stripe bulk payments and although tagging payments pre-stripe transfer seems like a lot of overhead, I’ll figure out a schedule to get it done. We do have multiple subscription payments and varied ones coming through, but I guess once I have a process in place it would be a dedicated overhead to account for, among the million other things to usually do in a startup
Wondering if that would upset my accountant if he suddenly starts seeing a change in the reports. Need to sit down with him first.
I have been trying to implement this. I have now attributed some purchases, both gross amount and stripe fees, into the Stripe holding(merchant) account. There’s a “Tag Me” for the gross sales on the merchant account. I have tagged the Stripe fees as payment outgoing from the merchant account to a new client called “Stripe” which I have created.
I usually import my RBS statements into QF and then tag all the line items on the main account. I have matching amounts in both the current account and the merchant account since I have accounted for Stripe fees as well. My issue now is to do with the “Tag me!” buttons on both the merchant accounts as well as the main account. Earlier, I would just tag the entire amount to “Stripe Payments”, since I wouldn’t account for their fees neither did I have a merchant account in place. But now I’m trying to implement a new workflow. So my questions are simple, with respect to the tags:
How do I tag the payment on the merchant account for the gross sales from Stripe?
How do I tag the net amount on the bank statement that I uploaded to the current account(part of my regular effort to learn bookkeeping)
The article which Glenn had mentioned refers to tagging the merchant account payment as “Bank transfer” to main account. However, the tag on my current account still remains untagged to anything. Which account do I actually attribute an invoice to? Mind you, I do not have pre-populated sales invoices but only the ones which automatically get created as a result of the tagging process (for some of our products which are web sales it’s not possible at all to create an invoice at all. The consumer simply goes to the website, clicks pay and downloads the products, so there’s no way I can create invoices for these sales)
My guess is : Tag the main bank account items as “bank transfer” from the main account, and tag the gross items to invoices(Created on the fly) on the merchant account. Is that the right way? I tried doing this, but this goes against what’s mentioned on the link that Glenn had posted so wanted to check if this is correct?
As “payment from a customer”. You can create a new invoice as part of the tagging process, to a fake customer called something like “web sales”.
For a bank transfer you only need to create and tag one side of the transaction. If you import your RBS statement to the current account and tag the stripe settlement payment as a transfer from the merchant account, then QuickFile will automatically create the matching “money out” transaction on the merchant account side. You don’t need to enter that manually.
I have a similar situation with Payleven (chip and pin card payments in my shop). I never actually have to enter transactions directly into my Payleven merchant account:
For sales, I “log a payment” from the sales invoice screen into the merchant account.
For settlement payments I tag the transaction from the current account end.
For fees, Payleven send me a monthly invoice which I upload to the receipt hub and create a purchase from there, ticking the “fully paid up” checkbox to mark it as paid from the merchant account
