Stripe: I managed to do my own invoice reconciliation for my accountant via DATEV export

Hey,

Last week, my accountant asked me to export all of our invoices to DATEV. She said it was just too much to process manually. We weren't growing fast, but there are still one or more invoices we need to process. Some of our customers make monthly payments, so this adds up.

As we use Stripe as our payment provider, I was first looking for an "easy" solution to just automate it via some SaaS and was pretty disappointed. There is no "payable" SaaS that does this without you having to schedule a demo with their sales team :rolleyes:

Anyway, I sat down and made the CSV export myself. We just needed to import every invoice we had this year (and when it was paid) from Stripe. That's easy with the Stripe SDK.

But then I was left with these questions:

Did I do everything right here? Or did I miss an invoice in my import from Stripe? Were the paid amounts correct?

###So, how do we validate our report for the accountant after we export it?
Given that we have some payouts on Stripe, for example, on the 15th of every month, they do not help you understand if you missed something because they will contain transfers from December of the previous year or January of the next year.

And your bank account transfers might include some customers who have used wire transfers to pay an invoice. (Yes, we Germans love wire transfers.) We mark the invoice in stripe as "Paid outside of stripe".

We have three parts that we need to match:

1. your bank account transfers
2. paid invoices on stripe.com
3. the export with all invoices of that year

What a mess :)

Interested in the solution? Let me know in the comments!
It's a bigger writeup, but if this provides any value to anyone, I would provide it for free.

##The short version

Build the CSV export with these docs:
https://developer.datev.de/datev/platform/en/node/11596(Sorry, this should be the English site, but it's barely translated.)Take your export to Excel.

Pull in the transfers from your bank account. Map all wire transfers from your list of invoices to a transfer in your bank. (Funny things will happen here.)

Sum up the rest of the invoices and compare this with Stripes' payment reconciliation report.

Thanks!
Philipp

*bootstrapped startup cheap