An invoice, a processor payment, and a bank deposit are three related records—not one record copied three times. Reconciliation is the work of proving how the gross customer payment became the net amount in the bank and how both map back to the invoice.
Invoice Master helps with the invoice and payment-history side of that chain. It is not a general ledger and does not directly sync with QuickBooks or Xero.
Start with a four-part model
For every online payment, preserve:
- Invoice: customer, number, currency, gross amount, tax, issue date, and due date.
- Processor event: amount paid, timestamp, method, processor identifier, fee, refund, or dispute.
- Payout: one bank deposit that may combine several transactions and adjustments.
- Bookkeeping entry: income, tax liability, processor fee, receivable settlement, refund, and bank movement under your accounting policy.
If the bank shows 970 after a 1,000 payment and a 30 processor fee, recording only 970 as revenue understates both sales and fees. The exact entries depend on your accounting basis and jurisdiction, but the source facts should remain separate.
What the Invoice Master–Stripe link records
Premium users can create a Stripe-hosted payment link for an invoice. The invoice payment-link workflow covers setup and customer checkout in detail. When Stripe reports a successful payment, Invoice Master adds a payment record and recalculates the invoice balance and status. Stripe remains the authority for processing, fees, disputes, and payouts.
Later refunds and chargebacks are not automatically mirrored back into Invoice Master. After handling them in Stripe, add a Refund or Chargeback entry to the invoice payment history. This keeps the invoice balance meaningful without pretending the two systems are a live accounting ledger.
Reconcile in three passes
Pass 1: invoice to payment
Match by invoice number or metadata, customer, currency, and amount. Investigate partial, duplicate, or missing payments. Confirm that a Paid status is supported by payment entries rather than by a manual label alone.
Pass 2: payment to payout
Use Stripe’s transaction and payout records to explain the net bank deposit. One payout can contain multiple payments, fees, refunds, reserves, or dispute adjustments. Stripe provides dedicated payout reconciliation guidance for this processor-side work.
Pass 3: payout to books
Post the bank deposit and clearing-account activity according to the bookkeeping method agreed with your accountant. Confirm that sales tax or VAT is not lost inside a net deposit, and that processor fees are categorized separately from refunds.
Where bills and reports fit
Invoice Master bills record supplier, invoice number, issue and due dates, currency, line items, tax, notes, and optional company or project links. They feed expense and profit views, but they have no payment-status ledger, receipt upload, OCR, or bank reconciliation.
Premium Reports provides accounts-receivable aging, overdue-balance trend, cash-in versus expenses, top clients, and CSV/PDF exports. The dashboard and reports help spot discrepancies; they do not replace the bank and processor reconciliation.
Current report interface in a seeded demo workspace. The values are examples, not business results.
Export without inventing an integration
For application-level portability, an organization owner can export a JSON archive and import it in append or replace mode. The Invoice Master export article separates that archive from report CSVs and document PDFs. Premium report tables can be exported as CSV or PDF. Invoices and quotes can be downloaded as PDFs, including selected ZIP downloads.
There is no general “export every invoice as accounting-ready CSV and import it into any ledger” button, and no direct QuickBooks/Xero connection in the current product. A reliable handoff may therefore use report CSVs, PDFs, the JSON archive, and processor exports together—plus a mapping agreed with the bookkeeper.
A month-end checklist
- Every paid invoice has supporting payment history.
- Refunds, chargebacks, and adjustments appear in both systems.
- Processor gross activity reconciles to net payouts and fees.
- Payouts reconcile to bank deposits.
- Invoice currency and payout currency differences are explained.
- Supplier bills have correct dates, tax, and project links.
- Reports reconcile to source documents for the same timeframe.
- Exports needed for the accountant are stored with an explanation of each column and basis.
Good reconciliation is not exciting automation. It is a chain of evidence that another person can follow without guessing.