Tuesdays are bookkeeping day here at B2B Solutions, and each week we like to share a little something to help you keep your books clean and accurate. This week, we’re looking at a small mix-up that’s easy to make with tools like Stripe and Jobber — and just as easy to get right once you know what to watch for.
Modern payment tools have made invoicing and getting paid wonderfully simple. That’s a good thing. But there’s one common spot where the convenience can trip people up, and because it happens so quietly, most business owners have no idea it’s going on. The good news is it’s a straightforward fix.
The mix-up: recording the same dollar twice
Here’s the sequence we see all the time, and honestly, it makes complete sense why it happens. You create an invoice in Jobber or Stripe. The customer pays. You mark the invoice as paid. Then, when the money shows up in your bank account, you enter that deposit into your accounting software as revenue.
That last step is the one worth a second look.
The invoice already recorded the sale. When the deposit arrives, it isn’t a new sale — it’s simply the money you already earned, finally landing in the bank. Ideally, it should be applied as a payment against that open invoice rather than entered as a brand-new line of income.
When it’s recorded as revenue instead, that same sale ends up counted twice: once when the invoice was created, and again when the deposit came in. It’s an honest, understandable mistake — but repeated across a year’s worth of transactions, it can add up and make your income look quite a bit larger than it really was.
This holds true whether your books are on a cash or accrual basis. The idea is the same either way: a payment is the collection of a sale you’ve already recorded, not a second sale.
Why it’s worth catching
Counting a sale twice doesn’t just make the reports look a little off. A few things tend to follow:
- You can end up overpaying taxes. When income is overstated, you may be paying tax on money you never actually earned. That’s the one most owners care about, and it’s usually the biggest.
- Invoices don’t close out. Since the payment was booked as new revenue instead of applied to the invoice, the original invoice stays open — so your list of “unpaid” invoices fills up with things that were actually paid ages ago.
- Your reports get harder to trust. Profit and loss, cash flow, margins — they all drift, which makes it tougher to make confident decisions about pricing, hiring, or growth.
- Reconciling takes longer. When the books stop matching the bank, tidying it up later takes more time than doing it cleanly from the start.
None of this is cause for alarm — it’s just a good reason to peek at how your deposits are being handled.
A quick word about Stripe fees
Stripe adds one more little wrinkle worth knowing about. It takes its processing fee before depositing your money, so a $100 invoice might show up in the bank as $97.10.
If you enter that $97.10 as revenue, two small things slip by: the sale gets double-counted, and you also miss recording the fee — which is a legitimate, deductible business expense.
Handled cleanly, that same transaction records the full $100 payment against the invoice, books the $2.90 as a merchant processing fee, and nets to the $97.10 that actually hit your account. Everything lines up, and you capture the deduction you’re entitled to. Jobber payouts work the same way — the full sale, the fee, and the net deposit each have their own home.
The clean way to record it
Once you know the rhythm, it’s simple:
- The invoice records the sale.
- When the customer pays, receive that payment against the invoice so it closes out.
- Book any processing fees as an expense.
- Match the net deposit in your bank feed to that payment.
The result: each sale is counted once, invoices close properly, fees are captured, and your books reconcile neatly.
A few gentle warning signs
You don’t need to be an accountant to notice these. It might be worth a look if:
- Your list of open invoices includes ones you’re sure were paid.
- Your reported revenue feels higher than what really came through the door.
- Your Stripe or Jobber totals don’t quite match your bank deposits.
- You can’t find processing fees anywhere in your expenses.
Any one of these is simply worth a closer look — and an easy thing to straighten out.
How we can help
The nice part is that keeping this clean doesn’t take much. Having a bookkeeper set it up correctly and stay on top of it is a modest, predictable cost — and it often saves far more than it costs, especially when it keeps you from paying tax on income you never actually earned.
If you use Stripe, Jobber, or any other payment platform and you’d just like a second set of eyes to make sure your deposits are being recorded the right way, we’re happy to take a look. That’s what Tuesdays are for.
Have a bookkeeping question you’d like us to cover in a future Tuesday post? Send it our way — we’d love to hear it. Get in touch »