merit-stripe

Merit Stripe

How Stripe card payments are set up and recorded in Merit Aktiva. The implementation is the elnora-merit reconcile command; this skill is the why and the rules so any agent books it correctly and can spot a wrong entry.

The one thing to get right: Stripe is a clearing account, not your bank. Stripe holds the money, deducts its fee, then pays out the NET in batches. So you cannot book the bank deposit as revenue — it is already net of fees. Revenue is booked GROSS, the fee is a separate expense, and a clearing account in between holds the payout net until the real bank-import row clears it.

The booking model — one summary GL batch per payout

Each Stripe payout is booked as a single balanced sendglbatch. Card sales are aggregated (no per-buyer customer or invoice — the canonical treatment for high-volume B2C card sales; genuine company invoices that need an A/R record are booked separately).

Dr  Clearing      gross        all card sales in the payout, VAT-inclusive
Cr  Revenue       net          gross ÷ 1.24 — carries the 24% TaxId + VatAmount
   [Cr VAT payable vat]        output VAT — IMPLICIT, Merit posts it from the tag
Dr  Stripe fees   fees         processing + platform fees, a separate expense
Cr  Clearing      fees
Dr  Refunds  / Cr Clearing     only when the payout contains refunds

The clearing account is left holding exactly the payout net, which the real bank-import row clears against (one manual match in the Merit UI).

VAT period — date each batch on the CHARGE month (§11), not the payout arrival

Estonian time of supply (KMS §11) is the earlier of supply or payment — for a card sale the charge/capture date, not when Stripe pays out. reconcile dates each batch on the charge month: usually equal to the payout arrival, except a month-end straddle (charges captured in month N, paid out in N+1), which it dates back to the charge month so the output VAT lands in the correct KMD period.

A payout whose charges span two or more months cannot be dated to one VAT month. The tool flags it in preview and run skips it (marked not bookable) rather than mis-dating it — it does not auto-split (yet). Book it by hand as one GL batch per charge month (DocNo po_…-MAY / po_…-JUN), splitting gross/net/VAT/fees per charge, not by dividing the aggregate ÷ 1.24. Per-charge rounding ties to the cent and matches the tool's single-month batches; the aggregate method is ~1 cent off per batch. The two batches together net to the payout and are cleared by the single bank row.