Key takeaways:
Stripe is a payment processing company that also comes with basic financial reporting. Close to 2 million websites use Stripe, holding an 18.54% market share in the payments processing category.
While Stripe is a great payment processing tool, however, its reporting features aren’t as advanced. In this post, we’ll discuss the limitations of Stripe’s reporting and why SaaS businesses use Baremetric’s Stripe integration (seen below) for more detailed financial analytics, forecasting, and more.
A Sample Stripe Dashboard
Stripe can provide standard financial reports to reconcile transactions and activity in your account. A dashboard displays a summary, which you can download as an itemized account (in CSV format).
Stripe has two main financial reporting tools: Balance and Payout Reconciliation. These tools help you create reports of your transaction history, payments.
The Stripe Balance Report provides a CSV report of your transaction history and other custom data associated with those transaction. It’s similar to a bank statement and useful for companies that use Stripe like a bank account to make manual payouts.
You can use your Stripe Balance Report to reconcile your balance at the end of every month.
If you enabled automatic payments and want to reconcile transactions settled in each payout, you will use this report. The Payment Reconciliation report matches payouts with batches of payments and other related transactions.
There are two primary Stripe transaction reports, the Balance Report and the Payment Reconciliation Report.
The Balance Report shows your itemised transaction history. It’s a CSV file that you can use in manual accounting.
The Payment Reconciliation Report is a summary of your transactions within a specific date range.
Stripe DOCS dashboard
Stripe measures several metrics relevant to Saas businesses. The metrics are included under the Growth, Retention, Subscriber Information, Product and Collections Information categories.
Stripe displays your Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), MRR Growth, Net revenue, and New Subscribers for specific periods. You can also view your MRR per product and per plan, if relevant. The downside is that Stripe may include trial users in its MRR calculations, which could inflate your data.
Stripe gives you access to your subscriber churn rate, churned revenue, and subscriber retention, and revenue retention by cohort.
Use Stripe to view your Average Revenue per Subscriber (ARPS), Lifetime Value (LTV), Top Subscribers, and Recently Churned Subscribers. You can also see your total billing history.
This allows companies to view Monthly Recurring Revenue by product or by service plan, depending on the nature of their business.
Stripe will give you insight into Recovered Revenue and Outstanding Invoices.
If you are technically adept and have a good understanding of data analytics, you can create custom reports that reveal data for charges, refunds, disputes, and others with Stripe Sigma. Sigma is a customizable SQL tool that allows users to write queries and track how metrics change over time.
Anyone can create or edit a query via a template. Clients can generate a custom report detailing recurring revenues per month or per year, average revenue per customer, or even how many invoices remain unpaid. It’s an excellent tool for companies that do not like pre-packaged reports.
You can download all your account activity grouped by month up to the last full day, including charges, refunds, fees, etc. You can go through this via the Stripe dashboard. Alternatively, you can filter and export all transactional data as a CSV or download a monthly report or QuickBooks-formatted export via your account’s business settings.
Source: Stripe DOCS
Stripe has many excellent reporting features, and the dashboard displays essential information, but there are few blind spots in their reporting that you may want to supplement.
MRR Growth Rate is a great metric, but manual forecasting isn’t easy. Stripe will display your MRR, but it won’t provide you with a revenue forecaster.
You can view new and active subscriptions with a click of a button with Stripe reports, but you can’t drill down and distinguish between plan quantities, upgrades, downgrades, failed charges, or refunds with the same ease. As dunning management is a crucial part of your SaaS business, you may want to look for an additional automation tool that integrates directly with your reporting.
You can view Churn Rates in Stripe (based on revenue), but it doesn’t display downgrades versus actual cancellations. You can see that customers are leaving, but not why they are churning. It’s tough to drill down into customer metrics and motivation.
Discover how Stripe customers can calculate churn with Baremetrics.
Stripe doesn’t make distinctions about customers using a trial version of your software solution.
Stripe reports contain very little information about customers, and it’s not possible to augment information using third-party data. As a SaaS company, you might want deeper profiling information.
Benchmarking helps companies gain an independent perspective about the company and how well they compare in terms of performance and delivery to the competition. Your benchmarks are a great sales tool when pitching to clients and investors. With Stripe, you cannot compare your Stripe metrics to other companies of your size and scope.
Baremetrics’ Benchmarking Tool
Stripe doesn’t allow for granular segmentation, e.g., looking at churned customers cross-referenced with the plan they are using. This can make it difficult to gauge which strategies are working and which aren’t.
Customer acquisition costs (CACs) tell you how much you’re spending to acquire customers— and Stripe certainly doesn’t give you this information. You can, however, use tools like Baremetrics to calculate your customer acquisition costs for Stripe customers.
Customer lifetime value (LTV) is a vital metric that helps you assess the average value of a single customer across their relationship with your business. Some customer segments may have higher LTVs than others. This metric can helps you better predict revenue and make more informed decisions regarding marketing campaigns— including whether those CACs are worth it.
See how Stripe customers can calculate LTV with Baremetrics.
Stripe provides basic reporting to help teams get started, but growing SaaS & subscription companies upgrade to Baremetrics for more depth, accuracy, and supplementary tools.
Baremetrics has many reports similar to Stripe, but in addition to focusing on the current financial situation, Baremetrics also focuses on forecasting your company’s financial future.
You can use Baremetrics’ templates to create multiple scenarios and even include variables that reflect the best and worst-case performance scenarios. You can also compare scenarios with actuals year after year to improve your accuracy and measure your KPIs.
Better financial reports enable better decision-making.
With the Baremetrics toolkit, you can view more detailed data across customizable periods. Here are the tools that Baremetrics has that Stripe doesn’t.
The Forecasting tool allows you to make informed predictions and projections about your company’s future, including MRR projections, cash flow projections, and customer projections.
Baremetrics Forecasting Dashboard
The Reporting tool pulls data directly from Stripe or other payment processors and displays the information in easy-to-digest graphs and charts.
Baremetrics tracks 26 essential SaaS metrics including Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), Net Revenue, and more.
You might also want to see summarized data in a quarterly or annual form instead of getting information overload for every day on your screen. After all, SaaS companies have many unique metrics and KPIs that can’t be communicated using only the three statement structure of the Operating Model.
Your trials are valuable tools for conversion. Baremetrics allow you to measure how customers behave during their trial. Are they using all the features? Are they logging in every day? If not, a quick phone call might help them find success – and sign on once the trial ends!
Your customers form the backbone of your success. Baremetrics offers profound insight into your customers, right from your financial reporting dashboards. You can view where your customers are located, their lifetime value, and their transactions.
Baremetrics also allows you to segment those customers any way you want. Want a glance at how many customers have signed on in your home base? Or which customers canceled this week? You can, with the click of a button.
Baremetrics also has automated recovery tools to help reduce churn and recover failed payments – all on the same platform!
Stripe is great for showing you the basics about your data, but it’s not enough to get a complete picture of what’s going on. With Baremetrics, you’ll see more in-depth information and have access to all the necessary metrics that can help with better decision making. Baremetrics offers the best stripe analytics dashboard, sourcing all the key data and giving you the metrics that matter.
"Tired of wasting time on spreadsheets? Get a free trial of Baremetrics today!"