Bank feeds, middleware or a subledger: three ways Stripe reaches QuickBooks Online

Stripe activity reaches QuickBooks Online by one of three routes. Each carries a different amount of the story, and each suits a different business. This post says what each one does, without ranking them.

Route 1: the QuickBooks Online bank feed

The bank feed brings in the bank's view: one deposit line per Stripe payout, for the net amount, with the bank's description. Nothing else arrives by this route. The sales, fees, refunds and disputes behind the payout are not in the feed, because the bank never saw them.

Used alone, the bank feed works when sales are booked some other way and the payout is categorised as a transfer from the Stripe clearing account. It does not work when the payout is categorised as income: revenue is then recorded net of fees, fees are never recorded, and if sales are also booked from Stripe, revenue is recorded twice.

Fits: a business that books Stripe sales by a monthly entry from Stripe's reports and uses the feed only to record the deposits.

Route 2: middleware

A sync connector (Synder, Acodei and others, and Intuit's own Stripe connector app) listens to Stripe and creates QuickBooks Online documents for each event: a sales receipt for a charge, a refund receipt for a refund, an expense for a fee, a deposit or transfer for a payout. The documents carry the Stripe ids and dates. The payout document is then matched to the bank feed line.

Middleware adds the detail the bank feed lacks, at the transaction level, and posts it when the event happens. The accounting settings are made in advance in the connector; the result is reviewed in QuickBooks Online, or, in a connector with a manual mode or a review tab, before it is sent. Corrections are made in QuickBooks Online, or, in some connectors, by removing the synced documents and syncing again.

Fits: a business that wants Stripe in QuickBooks Online at the document level, with customer records, and reviews the result in QuickBooks Online. Eight questions to ask before choosing one.

Route 3: a subledger

A subledger sits between Stripe and QuickBooks Online and keeps its own balanced record: every charge, fee, refund, dispute, payout and bank deposit, in a chart of accounts mapped to QuickBooks Online. It reconciles that record to Stripe's reported balance and to the bank statement, and drafts one summarised entry per account and activity per month. The entries are reviewed in the subledger and posted when approved. QuickBooks Online receives totals; the transaction detail and the lineage stay in the subledger.

A subledger adds what neither of the other routes carries: the state between Stripe and the bank (what is pending, what is available, what is in transit), the variance between what Stripe should have paid and what the bank received, listed by cause, and a review step before the general ledger. It does not carry customer-level documents into QuickBooks Online.

Fits: an accountant, bookkeeper or fractional CFO keeping the books for a Stripe-paid business, who reviews before posting and wants QuickBooks Online summarised. ClearDeposits is a subledger of this kind; what to look for if you are moving from a sync connector.

Side by side

Using two routes together

The bank feed is used with both of the others; it is how the deposit is matched. Middleware and a subledger are rarely used together, since both book the sales. A business that needs customer documents in QuickBooks Online and a reconciled clearing account can run middleware for the documents and reconcile the clearing account by the method in the clearing-account method, by hand or in a spreadsheet.