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With over 4.7 million businesses leveraging its rapidly growing ecosystem of products, Stripe is one of the modern technology industry’s most established payment solutions – full stop.
While Stripe is leading the charge in simplifying financial infrastructure, integrating its data into legacy accounting software (like QuickBooks) is anything but simple. Between error-prone third-party APIs and tedious transaction matching, accounting teams have their work cut out to centralize financial data and automate revenue recognition in one place.
As a company built from the ground up by multiple former accountants, we’ve felt your pain firsthand and understand exactly what you’re going through. That's why we built Puzzle's native Stripe integration, a seamless and automated solution for accurate financial data tracking.
Puzzle’s Stripe integration enables both formation and growth-stage companies to stream high volumes of Stripe transactions directly into our accounting software.
No more sifting through cluttered spreadsheets or navigating third-party connectors to import transaction data to your general ledger. This integration is key to making accounting software of critical importance in your finance stack for companies with revenue powered by Stripe.
Trying to get next-gen solutions like Ramp, Rippling, Brex and more to work seamlessly alongside legacy accounting software is a losing battle for startups and fast-growing companies alike. With this native integration, accounting workflows no longer need to remain fragmented across multiple platforms – yielding downstream reconciliation challenges, unnecessary errors and extra costs.
By using Puzzle’s direct Stripe API connection (without middleware or connectors), companies can now seamlessly automate revenue recognition without the spreadsheets. As a result, teams are better equipped with real-time visibility into revenue and other key metrics – in turn improving confidence in automated accrual finances while freeing up time for strategic growth decisions.
“Almost all of my clients use Stripe as their primary payment source, so any accounting functions that work directly with Stripe are ideal.” — Brandon Correll, CPA & Lead Accounting Manager at Fondo
Like many initiatives on our roadmap, Puzzle's Stripe integration was spearheaded by customer feedback and learnings from our core engineering team. A key contributor was our Principal Software Engineer, Jason Mitchell. His experience working with disparate financial data sources as a Software Engineering Manager at Affirm was critical in bringing this integration to life.
In his previous role, Jason observed the pain point we strive to fix: accountants managing large amounts of financial data across bloated spreadsheets and legacy software. Beyond the frustrations of working with outdated tools, Jason was struck by the inefficiency of the work – locating a discrepancy was like "looking for a needle in a haystack." He knew he needed a modern system to sift through and organize millions of data points automatically.
So, Jason developed a new cash tracking & reconciliation system to automatically reconcile all loan and merchant-servicing money movements at Affirm. Fast-forward to his current role at Puzzle, Jason was able to apply this automation-first approach in building our Stripe integration.
By focusing on native integrations, we’re able to obtain more data that in turn helps power our categorization and reconciliation automations. In other words, more data means more context, which in turn delivers better AI workflows. As our team at Puzzle continues to ship new features and integrations on our product roadmap, we frequently return to this guiding philosophy.
"What we're doing at Puzzle is solving the most common accounting problems that companies face with technology. We're constantly listening to our customers and developing new ways to save them time, while also improving financial visibility." — Jason Mitchell, Principal Software Engineer at Puzzle
Using our native integration, teams can now connect their Stripe account in minutes and immediately start generating automated revenue schedules. From there, journal entries are automatically created within Puzzle, in turn delivering real-time financial metric calculations.
These drafted journal entries can be manually edited or adjusted as needed, including adding or removing specific Stripe data during a standard review process. From a technical lens, Puzzle’s Stripe integration streamlines accounting workflows in three core steps:
Rather than jamming up the general ledger, Puzzle first sends Stripe transaction data into the subledger. This workflow keeps your transactions clean despite the flow of Stripe data coming in. No matter how many transactions you’re processing; the general ledger remains readable.
For visibility, common examples of subledgers are Stripe reporting software like ChartMogul or Baremetrics, both of which track daily revenue (new, expansion, contraction, churn resurrection).
After your Stripe data has been pushed into the subledger, you can incrementally summarize it into the general ledger on your preferred timeline. Whether that's 30 or 300 transactions every day, Puzzle keeps your team in control of how they visualize and process their Stripe data.
This incremental process makes the data much easier to understand at a glance. But if accountants need to drill down into a specific week or month and scrutinize particular transactions, that data is all readily available in the subledger.
Once your Stripe data lands in Puzzle, our software automates revenue recognition and daily reporting. This saves accountants a significant amount of time while eliminating inevitable errors that come with spreadsheets and manual revenue recognition.
Plus, with Puzzle handling the most time-consuming steps of your accounting workflow, your month-end close is likely to see a dramatic improvement.
“Revenue recognition calculations can be highly inconsistent. There are hundreds of variations. So, having an automated process via Puzzle is a game changer.” — Brandon Correll, Lead Accounting Manager at Fondo
Puzzle's Stripe integration is already delivering outsized benefits to our existing customers across a broad range of industries. Take the leading bookkeeping and tax platform for startups, Fondo, as a prime example. Before Puzzle, its team was conducting manual revenue recognition across all its Stripe payments — a time-consuming and frustratingly error-prone process.
With Puzzle's Stripe integration, journal entries are now automated across both cash basis and accrual basis. Each entry is fully traceable & reconcilable back to Stripe, with Puzzle as a validation layer. Better yet, Puzzle rolls up revenue from Stripe and other sources to provide Fondo with a complete accounting picture, delivering a single source of financial truth. Here are the results since implementing the new Stripe integration:
“Not only is my job easier, but my clients can see accurate, mission-critical metrics in real time. I plan to share Puzzle with other startup clients so they can reap the benefits as well.“ — Brandon Correll, Lead Accounting Manager at Fondo
Learn how Puzzle's Stripe integration can help your team modernize its accounting workflows and boost financial visibility, while eliminating spreadsheets and manual processes to save you time and money – and critically – the peace of mind to make strategic business decisions from your real time financial data.
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