How to Effortlessly Manage Your Tito x Stripe Transactions

If you, like me, run an event using Tito you’ll no doubt be familiar with the daily deposit of Stripe payments into your accounting package of choice. After the initial joy of someone you don’t know giving you money comes that feeling of “how do I categorise these payments” and “hang on, there are 32 separate sales in this one amount” to “what do I do about Stripes fees?”

There’s no accounting for Stripe!

To date, I’ve tended to attribute Stripe sales to a specific Sales category in FreeAgent (my accounting package of choice). At the end of the year, I simply share an export of my Stripe sales with my accountant who works out the total fees and enters this as a line item in my annual accounts. 

However, this does mean that while my bank balances might tally in FreeAgent, many of the other reporting functions it offers aren’t 100% correct thanks to my slapdash approach.

If you’re running a single event then this approach might serve you well. However, it becomes more complicated if you use Stripe outside of Tito, or have more than one event on sale. The single daily deposit could incorporate Tito sales, merchandise sold via an online store, and a consultancy invoice paid online.

A line item for everything

In an ideal world, we’d have a way of unpacking that single Stripe payment into individual entries and have each transactions fees explained as an outgoing charge to the business. It’s worth saying that you can do this manually in FreeAgent but it’s time-consuming and prone to human error — I speak from experience.

Thankfully help is at hand in the form of DoubleAgent. This SaaS application is a plugin for FreeAgent users which “automates the repetitive work in your FreeAgent account”. I am on the £7+VAT per month plan as I operate a limited company — it’s worth every penny. Plans start from £5 per month + VAT.

Automatic reconciliation

The integration has many powerful features but the one that caught my eye, and why I am more than happy to pay a monthly fee, is its ability to automatically reconcile Stripe payments.

Here’s how it works:

1. Connect DoubleAgent to your Stripe and FreeAgent accounts
2. DoubleAgent looks through each Stripe payout and automatically explains each item
3. Stripe customer charges become FreeAgent invoice payments or sales transactions
4. Fees are correctly calculated and attributed as a bank/finance charge

With DoubleAgent in place, you are able to go from having a block sum categorised to a particular category to fully explained sales transactions with it’s associated Stripe fee added as a separate line item. 

I’ll freely admit that I may have whooped a little after running the integration for the first time. However, if I had RTFM I would have avoided a simple gotcha. Let me explain.

Paid invoice or sales transaction?

You’ll notice in the above steps that DoubleAgent can create a paid invoice or a sales transaction for each payment. In my excitement, I ran with the default setting of creating an invoice for each payment. However, Tito already sends customer receipts, and if you run a large event with many individual sales you’ll soon start filling up your dashboard with paid invoices that have no real purpose. 

By far the better option is to instruct DoubleAgent to add each Stripe charge as a sales transaction. As with the invoicing approach, each transaction will also have an associated Stripe fee categorised as a bank/finance charge but we won’t be creating invoices we have no real need for.

But it gets better. Using free text and a combination of variables you are able to customise exactly how you’d like your sales description to appear in FreeAgent. Available variables include {{charge}}, {{payout}}, {{name}}, {{email}}, and {{description}}. 

Thankfully our friends at Tito provide a very usable {{ description }} which I’d recommend you use as it contains all the information you’ll need to recognise the transaction.

There are two other options that are worth mentioning at this point. They are:

1. Whether the explanations need manual confirmation in FreeAgent or not
2. Whether you would like to be notified via email each time DoubleAgent explains a payout

I have both turned on as it’s nice to give everything a final once-over before confirming each transaction and the email is a nice reminder to go in and reconcile transactions.

DoubleAgent doesn’t limit itself to one Stripe account either. Perhaps you are running an event in the USA which uses your $USD account and one in Germany using your €EUR account — no problem! Simply attach each account to DoubleAgent and set the rule appropriately. 

Automate everything?

There’s a lot more functionality in DoubleAgent that you can make use of to help manage your FreeAgent account including rules to automatically categorise regular payments and the ability to pull PDF receipts from an email and associate them with the relevant expense.

Finally, I’d like to say that I am in no way affiliated with DoubleAgent but if you use the following link … I’m only kidding, there’s no affiliate link here. Occasionally you just come across a really useful, time-saving, piece of software and that’s exactly what DoubleAgent is. I hope you find it as beneficial as I do.

A post by Keir Whitaker.

Business Consultant for Shopify Partners & Co-Founder of Default

I’ve been working in the technology, web, and SaaS sector for 20 years — both independently and for companies including Shopify. I’ve worked in web development, product marketing, content strategy, team development and held numerous leadership positions. In addition to my consulting services, I co-run Default — a product and services company focused on professionals working at the forefront of the Shopify Partner ecosystem.