Stripe Processing Fees
When your church accepts an online donation through Stripe, a processing fee is deducted from the gift before the funds settle in your account. TimelyChurch automatically records that fee in your accounting module so your books show what actually happened: a gross gift came in, and a fee went out as an expense.
This article explains how that auto-recording works, where the fee posts in your chart of accounts, and how it shows up on giving statements vs. accounting reports.
The Short Version
| Concept | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Donation amount recorded in TimelyChurch | Gross: the full amount the donor gave (e.g., $100.00). |
| Stripe processing fee | Recorded automatically on each online gift: the amount withheld from that gift (the standard 2.9% + $0.30 for a card gift). |
| How the fee posts to accounting | A separate expense transaction in your "Processing Fees" account, dated the same day as the donation. |
| How the donation is reported on giving statements | Gross amount only. The fee does not appear on the donor's tax statement. (This is correct: the donor gave the full amount; the fee is the church's cost of doing business.) |
| What you see on the bank deposit | Stripe deposits the net to your bank, but TimelyChurch's books show gross income + fee expense, so the net of the two reconciles to the deposit. |
How Auto-Recording Works
When a donor completes an online gift on your church's public giving page:
- Stripe captures the funds. The donor is charged the gross amount.
- After the charge succeeds, TimelyChurch records the processing fee withheld from the gift on the donation. For a card gift this is the standard 2.9% + $0.30, which is the amount kept back from that gift before it reaches your payout.
- The fee is shown on the donation (the Refund window, for example, lists Stripe fee, non-refundable).
- When the accounting transaction for the donation is created, TimelyChurch automatically posts a separate expense transaction to your church's processing fee account whenever a fee is present.
- Both the donation income and the fee expense are dated the same day and linked to the same donation, so they trace together in audit reports.
If Stripe has not finalized the fee when the gift is recorded (this is rare), the donation may be saved without a fee value. The donation income still posts correctly, and the Refund window marks the fee as an estimate (est.).
The Processing Fees Expense Account
TimelyChurch tracks processing fees against a single expense account per church. You choose it (or accept the default) on the Finance Settings page, under Payment processor fees.
Default Account
If no processing fee account has been chosen, the first online gift triggers TimelyChurch to auto-create an expense account named "Processing Fees" with account number 5950 and description "Auto-created for tracking payment processing fees (PayPal, Stripe, etc.)" The account is then saved as the church's processing fee account for all future fee postings.
This auto-creation only happens once. After that, every Stripe fee on every online donation flows into the same account.
Choosing a Different Account
If you'd rather post fees to an existing expense account (for example, a "Bank & Merchant Fees" line you already use), choose it as the Processing Fee Account on the Finance Settings page (and pick a Processing Fee Category so fees show in your category reports), then click Save settings before going live. Future donations use whatever account is set at the time the donation is recorded; historical postings are not retroactively re-routed.
Finding Finance Settings: The Finance Settings page does not have its own menu item. It opens from the Open Finance Settings → link that the bank-import review queue shows when imported rows carry a fee and no fee category is set. See Stripe Fee Auto-Recording.
Why an Expense Account?
The fee really is a church operating expense. Treating it as an expense (rather than reducing the gift amount or netting it against income) makes the church's books cleaner:
- The income statement shows the full generosity of donors (gross income).
- The expense statement shows the cost of accepting card payments.
- The board can see, at a glance, how much the church is paying to process online gifts.
- Donor giving statements stay accurate to what donors actually gave.
Gross vs. Net: What Shows Where
Giving Statements (Donor-Facing)
Year-end giving statements report gross amounts. If a donor gave $100 and Stripe took $3.20, the donor's statement shows $100. This is the IRS-correct treatment: the donor gave $100; the fee is between the church and Stripe.
Giving Dashboard
The Giving page summary cards show gross donation totals. The "Online" card sums up the gross amounts of online gifts.
Accounting Reports (Income Statement / Treasurer Report)
These reports show both sides:
- Income: gross donations, grouped by income category.
- Expenses: processing fees as a line item under your operating expenses.
- Net Income: the real bottom line, which matches the net deposits Stripe sends to your bank.
When you reconcile your bank account, the Stripe payout will be net. To match it, sum the gross donations for the period and subtract the processing fee expenses for the same period. The difference should equal the Stripe payout.
Bank Reconciliation
Because the gross income and fee expense already exist as separate accounting entries, you reconcile against the net payout amount that Stripe sends. When you import your bank statement, a Stripe payout that TimelyChurch recognizes shows a Stripe deposit badge with a Who's in this deposit? link that lists each gift, fee, and net amount in that payout. See Bank CSV Import.
What About Non-Stripe Online Gifts?
Auto-fee-capture only works for Stripe-processed online donations on TimelyChurch's public giving page. For PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, Zelle, or any other off-platform processor, TimelyChurch cannot pull the fee automatically.
If you want fees from those platforms tracked the same way, you can manually enter the fee on the donation when you record it in the Processing Fee field. See Recording Donations for details. The same accounting flow applies: gross income posts to the fund, and the fee posts as an expense.
Troubleshooting
"I see online donations but no processing fee expense entries."
Likely causes:
- The fee from Stripe was not yet available when the donation was recorded (rare).
- The donation is not actually a Stripe online gift (e.g., manually entered with payment method "Online" but no Stripe transaction ID).
Check the donation's processing fee. If it's empty or zero on a Stripe-processed gift, you can edit the donation and enter the fee manually using the figure from your Stripe dashboard.
"My processing fee account has the wrong number / wrong name."
Auto-create only happens once. To rename or renumber, edit the account directly under Finances > Accounting > Chart of Accounts. Existing fee postings will continue to reference the same account.
"I want fees split across multiple accounts (e.g., Stripe vs. PayPal)."
Not currently supported. All fees post to the single processing fee account configured for the church. If you want this granularity, post the donations and then journal-entry the fees to separate accounts in your accounting module after the fact.