Stripe/GoCardless Payment Processor payouts - Accounts reconciliation

Question

I understand this isn't strictly CiviCRM, but it's more a question to the community in how they work with the payouts of the popular payment processors Stripe & GoCardless.

As I understand it, both payment processors group income and payout at a certain frequency as a single payment to a bank account.

As part of our annual accounts submission, we have to show income separation between membership & donations. At the moment, that requires us to go back into Stripe or GoCardless admin UI once we receive our monthly bank statement and try and piece together how much of that payout was membership vs donations that month. Once that's done, we then can correctly input and tag it in our bookkeeping software (Sage in this case).

Is there an easier or more streamlined way to handle this?

Apologies if this is too far removed from CiviCRM subject matter and thus needs to be removed.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The most common approach to reconciliation is to update contributions within the CRM with the identifier from the payment processor. For Stripe we have a few approaches, our most recent is the payout reference from Stripe is automatically pulled back into CiviCRM. This allows the finance departments to run a payout report from both systems and reconcile. This has proved to be a very reliable and streamlined process. With GoCardless it's not possible to do an automated process unless you have the pro version with access to their APIs. You can perform a similar function by updating contributions in CiviCRM using the GoCardless data.

The key to a streamlined process is finance being able to easily find all the transaction which make up the transaction into their bank account, which involves some flow of information back from the payment processor into the CRM. The unfortunate part of this is all of the payment processors have varying levels of APIs and data to access.