How to book Stripe payments in your accounting (fees, refunds, payouts)
The deposit that lands in your bank is never the same as the sales that earned it — Stripe nets out fees, refunds, disputes and currency before it pays you. Getting the books right means accounting for each of those, not just the payout total.
Why your payout never matches your sales
It is tempting to book the amount that hits your bank as revenue. It is almost never correct. Stripe holds your charges, deducts its fee, subtracts any refunds and disputes that settled in the same batch, converts non-home currencies, and only then pays out the remainder.
So a single payout can bundle dozens of charges, several fees, a refund and a chargeback — netted into one number. Book that number as sales and your revenue, VAT and fees are all wrong at once.
- Stripe fees reduce the payout but are a cost, not lost revenue
- Refunds and chargebacks reduce it too, and belong on their own accounts
- Currency conversion and timing shift the total further
The accounts you actually need
A clean Stripe setup separates the money that moved from the reason it moved. In Swedish BAS terms that usually means a bank account for the deposit, sales and output-VAT accounts for revenue, and cost accounts for what Stripe took.
If you book each payout as a self-contained voucher, everything nets within it. If you book each charge as it happens, you also want a Stripe balance (clearing) account that holds money Stripe is sitting on until it pays out.
- Bank (e.g. 1930) — the actual deposit
- Sales and output VAT — revenue, split by rate/region
- Stripe fees — a finance cost account
- Refunds and chargebacks — separate from sales
- Stripe balance / clearing — only for the per-transaction method
One voucher per payout, or one per transaction
There are two defensible ways to book Stripe. Per payout: one voucher that books the bank deposit straight against sales, VAT and fees — simple, and it balances within itself. Per transaction: each charge, refund and fee posts as it settles against a Stripe balance account, and the payout later clears that balance to the bank.
Per payout is cash-flow-friendly and less noisy. Per transaction gives true accrual — revenue recognised at the moment of sale — and leaves the Stripe balance account matching what Stripe actually holds, which is a built-in reconciliation check.
Fees, refunds and chargebacks
Fees are a cost: debit a fee account, and the payout is that much smaller. Refunds reduce revenue: book them to a refunds account rather than negating sales, so your gross figures stay intact. Chargebacks are the disputed amount plus a dispute fee leaving your balance — book them to a dedicated chargeback account so you can see what fraud and disputes actually cost.
The trap most spreadsheets fall into is treating the payout as one line and losing all of this. Once a rate change or a half-öre rounding hits, the numbers stop tying out and nobody can see why.
Exporting to SIE-4 and importing into your software
SIE-4 is the Swedish standard exchange format for accounting data. Because it is a standard, a single SIE-4 file imports into Fortnox, Spiris (Visma eEkonomi), Bokio and most other Swedish bookkeeping software — you are not locked into one vendor or an expensive integration.
The practical workflow is: produce correct, balanced vouchers from a Stripe period, export them as an SIE-4 file, and import that file. The accounts you post to have to already exist in your chart of accounts, and the voucher dates have to fall in an open period.
Where SaldoKit fits
SaldoKit reads a Stripe period, reconciles every payout down to fees, refunds and chargebacks, and produces balanced SIE-4 vouchers — per payout or per transaction, whichever your accountant prefers. It applies the VAT rate that was in effect on each transaction date and flags anything that does not tie out.
Connect Fortnox and SaldoKit posts the finished vouchers straight into your books — Spiris (Visma eEkonomi) and Bokio next — or hands you a balanced SIE-4 file for any other program, all from your real Stripe data with no spreadsheet reconciling.