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The Payment Flow

How Habu, Stripe/Adyen, Xero work together (aka the payment and accounting flow)

Jak Ollett avatar
Written by Jak Ollett
Updated over 6 years ago

The Payment flow

There are many parties involved in payments and accounting. Your customer, a invoicing/billing tool (Habu), a payment processor (stripe/adyen), your business bank account and your accounting software/tools. At Habu we're committed making the process as frictionless as possible. However, it's a complex area that hasn't been solved by any other product we know of.  

Overview

There are two parts to the payment flow. A payment for an invoice goes directly from your members account to your Stripe account (minus their fees). These payments build up in Stripe and your total balance gets sent to you local bank account (payout).

Habu facilitates the original transaction, but does not follow the money through to your local bank account.
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Detailed flow

  1. A Habu admin creates an invoice in Habu and emails it to customer. Or with billing automation, Habu creates the invoice and emails it.

  2. The customer pays the invoice by credit/debit card, or if auto-payments are set up, the money is taken automatically on the 2nd of the month.

  3. The funds goes to your Stripe account, minus their fees. 

  4. After 2 to 7 days, the funds become available in Stripe. 

  5. You can then request or schedule payouts/withdrawal and the total available balance is transferred to your local business bank account. Stripe does not transfer individual payments for individual invoices. Instead it sends them out in batches. 

Example: 

You send 10x invoices in Habu, each for $100. When the invoices are paid, you will see 10x payments of $94.25 appear in your Stripe account, due to their fees of $5.75 (3.4% + $2.35 per transaction). After 2 to 7 days you’ll be able to request a payout of the entire balance to your local bank account. The payout will be $942.50, not 10 payments of $94.25.
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The accounting process

An important part of accounting is matching invoices (request for payments), to payments made to your business bank account. This is typically called reconciliation.

Accounting software, such as Xero, provide fantastic tools for speeding this process up. They can also create powerful reports, manage employees and even file your taxes. We cannot offer advice on what software to use and it is important to investigate what works for your own particular needs. But we do integrate with Xero and use it ourselves.

We chose to integrate with Xero first as they are cloud based and allow us to synchronise your invoice data from Habu. They can automatically import transaction data from your bank account but you will need to check whether your bank is supported. 

The issue

With Habu, Xero & your bank all connected, you can now begin the reconciliation process and match invoices with actual payments. Whilst this could and should be simple, there is still the issue of your payment processor, Stripe, doing payouts for the full balance, not per invoice (batching payments). 

It is currently a manual process to match individual invoices with batched payments. A CSV export of billing data in Habu can help you follow the trail.

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