Recognise revenue with Stripe
Learn how to use Stripe for your revenue recognition.
You can import your transaction data, set up rules to automate your revenue recognition, generate and customise revenue reports, and test your transaction model before going live.
All Stripe Revenue Recognition features are available from the Dashboard.
Try for free
Stripe offers a 30-day free trial for Revenue Recognition if you want to preview it. When you sign up, use a sandbox to explore all the features for free.
Set up revenue recognition
Revenue Recognition is already automated for some business use cases but requires additional setup for others. Below is a list of some common billing models. Click them to learn more:
Simple subscriptions
Usage-based billing subscriptions
Third-party recurring billing
Product bundles
Generate reports and charts
By default, the Dashboard displays all revenue recognition reports and charts by accounting periods (which we define as the start and end dates of a given month). It takes up to 24 hours for reports to generate and become available for download.
Note
If you’d like to recognise revenue based on custom accounting periods such as the 4-5-4 retail calendar, please create a ticket on our support page to join our beta.
Below is a short summary of the reports and charts you can view, download or both.
| Reports and charts | Description |
|---|---|
| Revenue overview | High-level bar graphs that show your revenue activity (that is, your net recognised revenue and your ending balance per month) over time. |
| Period summary | Details of the accounting activities for the last month or a specified previous month. See Period summary for more information. |
| Revenue waterfall | Displays expected recognisable revenue over time. This is also referred to as a revenue schedule chart. See Revenue waterfall for more information. |
| Income statement | Details of the revenue and contra revenue by month. |
| Balance sheet | Details of the balance sheet account by month. |
| Debits and credits | Details of the monthly debit-credit journal entries for accounts with activity. |
| Accounts receivable ageing | Details of the monthly and MTD outstanding invoice amounts that affect the accounts receivable ledger account. |
| Corrections | Details of the monthly debit-credit correction journal entries for accounts. |
| Trial balance | Shows the account balances for each general ledger account during each accounting period. See Trial balance for more information. |
Sometimes you’ll see mismatches between your accounting reports after you import the data and set up Stripe.
Test your transaction model
Use a sandbox in the Dashboard to generate test revenue reports based on your transactions.
Before going live, you can test the transaction model without your test transactions. Create rules to exclude transactions from specific customers, products, invoices or payments.
For example, you can exclude all revenues produced by a test customer, named ``. Create a rule that applies to this customer and choose Exclude revenue 100% as the revenue treatment.
Other considerations
You might need to handle other considerations such as tax revenue, passthrough fees, amortisation granularity, and catch-up revenue. You can further set up revenue recognition so Stripe can handle it for you.
Recognise tax revenue from third-party solutions
You can set up rules for Stripe Revenue Recognition to automatically calculate your tax revenue if you’re not using Stripe Tax.
First, set the tax amount to the tax parameter of an invoice or an invoice line item. Then, set up a rule to recognise the amount as tax. You can track the revenue from tax in the reports under Tax liability.
As an example, say you’re using Avalara AvaTax to calculate sales tax for your products. You want to treat the invoice line item for AvaTax as tax so you create this rule:
| Name | Apply to | Treatment |
|---|---|---|
Recognise tax revenue from AvaTax | Invoices Line item description contains all of the following: AvaTax | Treat as tax Allocation 100% |
Calculate passthrough fees
You can set up rules so Stripe can automatically calculate the passthrough fees and, separately, your revenue on invoice line items or a portion of an invoice line item.
For example, say you have an invoice line item Service A that costs US$100. You want to recognise US$10 as passthrough fees and recognise US$90 as revenue, so you create this rule:
| Name | Apply to | Treatment |
|---|---|---|
Service A includes passthrough fees | Invoices Line item description contains all of the following: Service A | Defer upon event & amortise over line item service period Allocation 90% Defer from finalised time and amortise over line item service period Treatment as passthrough fees Allocation 10% |
Adjust revenue recognition controls
Many business types can use Stripe Revenue Recognition without making configuration changes, but your business might have unique needs. You can use advanced settings on the Controls page to adjust revenue recognition reporting, including revenue amortisation granularity and catch-up revenue treatment.