From payment to payout: where your Stripe money goes

Every subscription business has two numbers for the same month. One is what your customers paid. The other is what landed in your bank account. They're never the same, and it's surprisingly hard to say exactly why, beyond a vague "Stripe takes a cut".

That gap isn't one thing. It's fees of several kinds, currency conversions, refunds, taxes riding along, and days of waiting. Each part is small, so nobody looks closely. Together they decide how much cash you actually have to run the company.

GrowPanel now follows the money all the way to your bank. If you're on Stripe, the new Payouts report shows what was paid out, every fee Stripe took on the way, and what's still in your Stripe balance. And if you run a platform on Stripe Connect, your platform income now shows up in the Cashflow report, where your other income is.

The trip from payment to bank

Here's what happens between a customer paying and the money reaching you:

1. Stripe takes a fee on the payment. On standard pricing that's most of what you pay. On interchange-plus pricing, the fee on each payment is small, and most of the cost comes later as separate charges.
2. Stripe charges fees that aren't on any payment. Network costs (the card schemes' and banks' share), card processing, the Stripe Billing fee for subscriptions and invoices, payout fees when you pay out in a currency other than your account's own, Radar for fraud screening, and Stripe Tax and Invoicing if you use them. These are taken straight from your balance, so they never show up next to a customer – and they're only in Stripe's balance reports, which is why tools that read your payments miss them.
3. The payment may be converted. If a customer pays in a currency your Stripe balance doesn't hold, Stripe converts it: a conversion fee, and a rate a little worse than the market's. That's an FX loss, taken when the payment settles.
4. Refunds and disputes come out of the same balance.
5. The money waits. A payment is pending for a few days before it's available, then it waits for your next scheduled payout, then the payout spends a day or more in transit to your bank.
6. Taxes travel with it. The VAT and sales tax you collect is paid out to you along with everything else, even though it isn't yours to keep.

To make that concrete, here's an illustrative month for a company billing $100,000:

The numbers are made up, but the shape is real. Fees of a few percent are normal for card payments.

The last two lines are about timing, not cost. Stripe holds each payment for a few days and then pays out on a schedule, so the money from the last days of a month reaches your bank the month after. Nothing is lost, it just moves between months. In a growing business, more is always on its way than arrived from the month before, and that gap is what surprises people when they plan cash.

What the Payouts report shows

The report has three tabs.

Payouts shows everything Stripe paid out, stacked by currency and converted to your reporting currency. Below it is every payout: when it was made, when it arrives, which bank account it went to and its status. If you charge in several currencies, you'll see that Stripe makes a separate payout per currency.

Fees shows every Stripe fee over time, not only the one on each payment, and your effective fee rate: all fees as a share of the money that came in. I think it's one of the most useful numbers you can have about payments, because it moves for reasons you can act on: a pricing change at Stripe, a new payment method, more customers paying with cards from abroad, a currency you don't hold a balance in.

You can split the fees by type or by currency, filter them, and switch between amounts and percentages. Click any number and you get the fee lines behind it, with Stripe's own description, so a spike is never a mystery.

Balance shows what's in your Stripe balance right now, per currency: available, pending, in transit, and an estimate of your next payout.

There's nothing to set up. GrowPanel reads all of it through the Stripe connection you already have, with no new permissions to approve, imports your full payout history and checks for new payouts every day.

Some currencies cost more than others

The view I find most interesting is fees by currency, in percentages. Each currency gets its own fee rate: what Stripe charged in that currency, as a share of the money that came in in it.

The rates are rarely the same. A currency where more customers pay with foreign or premium cards costs more to collect, and paying out in a currency your bank account isn't in adds a fee of its own. On a blended fee rate, all of that disappears into an average. Split by currency, one market can turn out to cost you noticeably more than the rest, and then you can do something about it: add a local payment method, pay out differently, or price that market differently.

Currency conversion counts too. It has its own fee type, Currency conversion: Stripe's conversion fee and its exchange-rate margin on every payment it converted into your balance currency, the same amount the Cashflow report shows as FX loss. That makes one trade-off visible. Hold a Stripe balance in each currency and the conversion cost all but disappears, but paying those currencies out has fees of its own. The Fees tab shows both, month by month, so you can see which setup is actually cheaper for you.

Platform income, in the Cashflow report

If you run a platform on Stripe Connect and take a fee from payments on your connected accounts, that money is income. It's real cash, but it isn't subscription revenue, so it never belongs in your MRR.

The Cashflow report now shows it as a revenue line of its own, Platform income, inside Gross and Net cashflow, with a projection for the current month and its own option in the Category filter. It only appears if you earn it.

When it lands in your bank

The cashflow forecast shows what your subscriptions will bill, month by month. For Stripe accounts, its three toggles now also take you to your bank: platform income joins one-time and usage payments, Stripe's fees are subtracted at the rate you actually paid recently, and the cash moves to when it should arrive, following your payout schedule. Turn them on and the forecast is the cash you can plan with.

You can also put Paid out and Stripe fees on your dashboard.

Stripe only, for a good reason

Payouts are only available for Stripe. Chargebee, Recurly and Alunta manage subscriptions, but they don't move the money. The payment provider behind them collects the payments and makes the payouts, so the payouts simply aren't in the data those systems share. If you're not on Stripe, the Cashflow report and the forecast stay exactly as they are.

If you want to know more about what payment costs do to your margins, the billing fees article in the Academy goes deeper, and the Payouts guide explains every number in the report.

If you're on Stripe, open Reports → Payouts and see where last month's money went.