QuickBooks Balance Sheet Report

Where Stripe money sits on the Balance Sheet

Every Stripe transaction changes the Balance Sheet, even the ones you think of as income. A $100 card sale adds to the asset that holds your Stripe balance. The fee Stripe keeps reduces that same asset. The net sale reaches equity through net income. When Stripe pays out, the holding account goes down and your bank account goes up by the same amount, so total assets don’t move at all.

The lines a Stripe business usually sees:

**Assets.** The account that stands in for your Stripe balance, either Undeposited Funds or a regular asset clearing account, sits alongside your bank account. Money moves from the first to the second with each payout. If you book open disputes to a receivable while you wait for the outcome, that is an asset too.

**Liabilities.** Intuit notes that sales tax is "Normally reported under Sales Agency Tax Payable, a liability account," so tax collected on Stripe sales sits here until you file and pay it. Customer deposits and retainers belong here as well: Intuit says retainers are "Often entered using a product/service item that is reported under a liability account." Any financing you repay out of your Stripe balance is a liability that each repayment reduces.

**Equity.** Retained earnings from prior years plus this year’s net income to date. A Stripe business with healthy sales but a growing, unexplained holding-account balance often has income on the P&L that never actually reached the bank.

Tie the Stripe line to Stripe’s ending balance

The single most useful check on a Stripe business’s Balance Sheet is one number: the holding account balance on the report date against Stripe’s own ending balance for that date.

Stripe’s Balance summary report "works like a bank statement." Its summary has four lines: a starting balance, activity (described as "the net amount of all transactions that affected your balance except for payouts"), total payouts, and an ending balance, which Stripe defines as "the balance left over at the end of the period after subtracting payouts from the Starting balance and Activity." Say September shows a starting balance of $4,210.00, activity of $18,940.35 and payouts of $19,105.00. The ending balance is $4,045.35, and a clearing account run as of September 30 should show the same.

When the two differ, three causes cover most cases. **Payout dates:** Stripe says an automatic payout’s effective date "is also when the paid-out funds are deducted from your Stripe balance," so a payout booked on the day the bank shows it, rather than that date, leaves the holding account high at month end. **Time zone:** Stripe’s report uses UTC unless you pick a timezone, so activity near midnight on the last day can fall in a different month. **Currency:** Stripe reports in your settlement currency, after any conversion.

A cash-basis Balance Sheet that still shows Accounts Receivable

Switching the report to cash basis should, in principle, leave nothing in Accounts Receivable, because cash basis only counts income once it is paid. In practice a cash-basis Balance Sheet often still shows a receivable or payable balance, and Intuit names two causes: "an accounts payable or accounts receivable transaction has affected the balance sheet account, or there’s an unapplied payment."

Both show up in Stripe files. An invoice line for sales tax, a deposit or a retainer posts to a balance sheet account, so a cash-basis report can’t fully remove it. And a payment received without being applied to its invoice, for example a Stripe payment recorded by hand while the invoice stayed open, leaves both an open invoice and a credit sitting in Accounts Receivable. Intuit’s fixes are to apply unapplied payments from the customer’s register, or to create the missing invoice and then apply the payment. Journal entries that reverse the balance are the last resort, and Intuit says to involve your accountant for those.

Net income on the Balance Sheet, and why it resets

The Net Income line in equity covers the fiscal year to date only. When the fiscal year turns over, that year’s result moves into Retained Earnings, so the Balance Sheet on January 1 shows zero net income and a larger retained earnings figure.

That is also why the Balance Sheet and the Profit and Loss can disagree. Intuit’s explanation: "Balance Sheet summarizes data at a specific point in time and Profit and Loss summarizes data just for the selected period." A Balance Sheet as of March 31 carries net income from the start of the fiscal year, while a March P&L carries one month. Intuit’s fix is to run both reports with the same dates, basis and filters, and then to check the fiscal year setting under your company settings if they still differ.