Stripe

Stripe is payment infrastructure for the internet: a platform that lets businesses accept card payments and dozens of local payment methods online, then manage everything that follows - payouts, refunds, disputes, subscriptions and reporting. It started as a developer-first API and remains the default choice for software companies, but its no-code and low-code products (hosted checkout, payment links, invoicing) have made it accessible to any business selling online, from a single-product shop to a large marketplace.

Stripe suits SMBs that sell online or bill customers electronically: SaaS companies running subscriptions, e-commerce brands, agencies invoicing internationally, and platforms that need to route money between multiple parties. Businesses with primarily in-person sales are usually better served by a point-of-sale-centric provider, although Stripe offers card-present hardware through Stripe Terminal as well. For European sellers specifically, its breadth of local payment methods often lifts conversion compared with card-only checkouts.

Key features

• Payments: accept cards, wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, and European methods such as SEPA Direct Debit, iDEAL and Bancontact.
• Checkout and Payment Links: hosted, conversion-optimised payment pages that need little or no code.
• Billing: subscription management with proration, trials, metered billing and dunning for failed payments.
• Invoicing: send invoices that customers can pay online, with automatic reconciliation of payment status.
• Connect: infrastructure for marketplaces and platforms that split payments between sellers.
• Radar: machine-learning fraud screening built into the payment flow.
• Reporting and payouts: consolidated dashboards, exportable reports and scheduled bank payouts.
• Terminal: card-present hardware and APIs for businesses that also sell in person and want one payments provider.
• Tax tooling: automatic calculation of VAT and sales tax on transactions in supported regions.

How it fits an SMB finance stack

In the finance stack, Stripe sits at the revenue edge: it is where customer money enters the business before landing in the bank as periodic payouts. That position makes its data valuable but also introduces a reconciliation task, because a single bank payout bundles many individual sales minus fees. Most SMBs connect Stripe to their accounting software - integrations exist for all the major ledgers - so those payouts unbundle into clean revenue and fee entries. For subscription businesses, Stripe effectively doubles as the billing system of record alongside the accounting ledger.

Because Stripe payouts arrive on a schedule and fluctuate with sales, they are one of the most important inflows to model when planning cash. A cash flow management tool like Trezy picks these payouts up through bank synchronisation, so Stripe-driven revenue shows up in forecasts as it lands in the account, alongside rent, payroll and supplier payments. That pairing lets an online business see not just what it sold this month, but whether the resulting cash covers what is going out next month.