Reconciling the Stripe 1099-K with QuickBooks

The Stripe 1099-K operates on erroneous logic, which places the time of a sale at the time the sale is available for withdrawal rather than the actual sale.

For example, if a sale is made on December 30, 2021, but is available for withdrawal on January 2, 2022, the 1099-K and QuickBooks will not be aligned. The 1099-K will count this transaction as occurring in 2022. QuickBooks Online (and our app) will consider this sale made in 2021.

As you can imagine, this has massive implications for the reliability and reconcilability between the 1099-K and your QuickBooks Online profit and loss statements for monthly and yearly reconciliations.

Stripe's logic on this issue is not clear, but you can read more about how they generate the 1099-K here: https://support.stripe.com/questions/1099-k-forms-issued-by-stripe#breakdown-of-transactions-applied-to-1099-k.

While the 1099-K relies on the "Available On" date, you can always access the actual sale time data by visiting https://dashboard.stripe.com/reports/balance and inputting the proper dates with the correct time zone. The data shown in QuickBooks and the data shown on the Balance Report should always align. By creating separate two separate standards of reporting (Balance Report and 1099-K), Stripe has caused significant confusion among tax filers.

Solutions

While we do not plan to modify our core logic to accommodate the Stripe 1099-K, you can choose how you would like to approach the discrepancy, leaving two primary options:

  1. After showing this support article to your accountant and reviewing balance reports, make monthly journal entry adjustments to your sales so that your monthly sales match the 1099-K generated by Stripe. Note that you will need to continue to make these manual adjustments unless Stripe changes its policy to accommodate real-time sales data on the 1099-K.

  2. Submit your taxes according to the Stripe Balance Report and QuickBooks Online P/L statement. Do this year after year without changing your methodology. If you happen to get audited, provide the auditor with the CSV report generated by Stripe that shows the actual transactions' dates and the monthly Balance Reports, which should match your P/L statement from QuickBooks Online.

We will continue to monitor this situation and develop solutions to address this problem.