Exclusion examples

Learn about revenue recognition with exclusion examples.

Unless stated otherwise, these exclusion examples recognize revenue in whole-day increments, which matches the default amortization granularity in your settings. You can change that setting to recognize revenue by the second or by the month.

Exclude transactions

Paid and unpaid transactions behave differently when you exclude them:

• Paid in cash : Stripe offsets the recognized revenue through the Exclusion account. Cash you already received isn’t reversed.
• Paid from the customer’s credit balance : Stripe debits the Customer balance account and credits the Customer balance adjustments account.
• Unpaid : Stripe generates no journal entries, and the transaction behaves as if it never occurred.

If you exclude transactions in a closed accounting period, it incurs corrections for transactions that have already been paid. Learn more about corrections.

Exclude paid transactions

This example uses the following assumptions:

• On January 5, 2025 , at 09:00:00 UTC, you create a one-time payment of 10 USD using either the Dashboard, the Charges APIs, or the Payment Intents APIs.
• By default, revenue recognition immediately recognizes the revenue from this one-time payment.
• On February 5, 2025 , you exclude the payment.
• The accounting periods for January 2025 are either closed or open.

After you exclude the payment:

• The revenue account clears to 0 USD because the payment doesn’t generate revenue.
• The cash account remains at 10 USD, acknowledging the received payment.
• An amount of 10 USD is added to the exclusion account.

At the end of February, your summary might reflect the following:

Exclude unpaid transactions

This example uses the following assumptions:

• On January 1, 2025 , at 00:00:00 UTC, a customer initiates a one-month subscription (from January 1 to Jan 31) that costs 31 USD.
• The subscription generates an invoice.
• The invoice finalizes, but the customer doesn’t make a payment.
• On February 1, 2025 , you exclude the payment.
• The accounting periods are open for January 2025 .

If you exclude a finalized invoice during an open accounting period, it leaves no trace of activity related to the invoice. Stripe removes all of the account activities, excluding the cash and customer balance account that isn’t involved in this case, and don’t generate journal entries from the finalization and exclusion of the invoice.