How customer and payment method sharing works

Learn how sharing groups sync customers and payment methods across accounts in an organisation.

Organisations on Stripe can share customers and payment methods across multiple accounts. When you enable sharing, customers and supported payment methods are automatically accessible across all accounts in your sharing group, so you don’t need to collect payment details from your customers more than once across different parts of your business. This allows you to avoid:

• Recollecting payment methods or contact information multiple times from the same customer
• Introducing inconsistencies in a customer’s contact and payment details between accounts
• Maintaining and updating duplicate records

To start using sharing, see Share customers and payment methods across accounts in an organisation.

Sharing groups

A sharing group is the set of accounts that share customers and payment methods with one another. An account can belong to only one sharing group.

When you enable sharing for a group of accounts, all customers and supported payment methods for those accounts are shared. You can’t configure sharing to apply only to specific customers or payment methods.

After you enable sharing for an account, you can’t disable it through the Dashboard. If you need to remove an account from sharing, contact Stripe support.

Customers

After one account in the sharing group creates a customer, Stripe automatically creates that customer in all other accounts in the group. Each account in the sharing group maintains its own instance of the shared customer, but all instances have the same customer ID.

Any account in the sharing group can update the customer through the Dashboard or the API. When a customer field is updated in one account, certain fields sync across all accounts in the sharing group. Other fields remain local to the account that set them.

• Fields that sync across the sharing group:
• name
• email
• address
• phone
• description
• tax_id
• preferred_locales
• metadata
• business_name
• shipping
• tax_exempt
• invoice_prefix
• Fields that remain per-account (not synced):
• default_source
• invoice_settings.default_payment_method
• balance
• discount

Customers might have different values for unsynced fields in different accounts. This protects the integrity of customer data that might be proprietary, sensitive or only relevant to one account.

It may take a few seconds for new customers to be available to other accounts in the sharing group. If this latency is an issue, you can:

• Listen for the customer.created event from each account before attempting to charge that customer on another account
• Wait a few seconds

Use best practices when you receive events:

• Verify event signatures
• Use Stripe’s public IP address list

Compatibility with v2 customers

You can only share payment methods across v1 Customer objects. You can’t share payment methods across v2 Account objects that have a customer configuration. Because of this:

• You can’t add a v2 Account to a sharing group. If an account already has v2 Accounts configured as customers, you can’t include that account in a sharing group.
• You can’t create a v2 Account configured as a customer within a sharing group.

Payment methods

Payment methods are stored with the account that created them, but all other accounts in the sharing group can access them. Any account in the group can charge, update or detach a shared payment method. Updating a shared payment method (including removal) affects its attached customers on all accounts in the sharing group.

Stripe only generates payment_method.<action> events for the originating account.

A payment method is only shared after it’s attached to a customer. Unattached payment methods remain restricted to the account that created them.

It may take a few seconds before a newly attached payment method is available to other accounts in the sharing group.

When you list a customer’s payment methods, Stripe returns results from the requesting account and up to four other accounts in the sharing group that have the most recently attached payment methods. This limit balances completeness with performance.

Supported payment methods

Sharing is available for some, but not all, payment method types.

Interested in ACH or the related setting Direct Debit payment method sharing?

Enter your email to request access.

The following payment methods are not supported for sharing:

• Legacy card objects (identifiers beginning with card_ )
• Legacy source objects (identifiers beginning with src_ )
• Legacy bank accounts (identifiers beginning with ba_ )
• Payment methods backed by Link ( pm _ with type=link )
• All other payment method types not listed above

You can attach other payment methods to a shared customer in one account, but they won’t be shared to other accounts in your organisation.

Cards issued in India can’t be used for off-session charges by an account in a different region.

ACH Direct Debit

ACH payment methods verified through Financial Connections (instant verification) are not supported for sharing. To share ACH payment methods, use microdeposit verification or direct entry of account and routing numbers instead. To check whether an ACH payment method is backed by Financial Connections, inspect the us_bank_account.financial_connections_account field on the payment method object.

the related setting Direct Debit

If your sharing group accounts process the related setting Direct Debit payments, we recommend configuring the same creditor identifier (CID) for all accounts in the group. This ensures consistency in mandate references and debit notification emails sent to customers. Learn more about the related setting creditor identifiers.

Charges and subscriptions

Any account in the sharing group can create a Checkout Session, charge or subscription using a shared customer or payment method. Charges appear on the Transactions page of the account that created the charge, not the account that owns the customer or payment method.

Card account updater

Card account updater fees for shared payment methods are billed to the account that owns the payment method (the account that originally created it), regardless of which account in the sharing group processes a charge.

Event behaviour

If an account updates any of the shared fields for a customer, Stripe generates separate customer.updated events for each account in the sharing group. If an account updates an unshared field for the customer, Stripe sends the customer.updated event to only that account.

If an account attaches a payment method to a customer, Stripe generates a single payment_method.attached event for only the originating account.

We recommend all accounts in a sharing group listen for events using an organisation-level webhook so you’re aware of shared payment method activity. When receiving webhooks, verify event signatures and use Stripe’s public IP address list.