Data import examples

Adding a service period to a Stripe payment

In this example, you use Stripe as a payment processor, but have your own recurring payment solution. You have payments in Stripe, but your separate system keeps the service period for these payments.

Suppose you have a payment in Stripe with the ID py_1234 of 120 USD on January 1, 2020 that represents a yearly subscription from February 1, 2020 to January 31, 2021. To add this data to Stripe, you can import a CSV with the following fields:

Stripe already has data on the booked date, amount, and currency, so you can leave these fields blank.

Adding or overriding a service period on an invoice line item

In this example, you use Stripe Invoicing, but you have your own recurring payment solution. You may have missing or incorrect service periods on your invoice line items.

Suppose you manually generated an invoice for a large enterprise customer and finalized this invoice on April 1, 2020. The invoice has the ID in_1234 and has several line items, some of which are physical goods, and some of which are subscriptions for other products. In your Revenue Recognition report by line item, you notice:

• An unexpected increase in April revenue in your report. The line item for one subscription (il_5678) has no service period, and so all of the revenue for that line item books into April.
• Another line item for another subscription (il_7890) has an incorrect service period of April 1, 2020 to April 15, 2020, resulting in revenue recognized in April.

You want to recognize revenue for il_5678 from May 1, 2020 to June 1, 2020, and recognize the revenue for il_7890 from June 1, 2020 to September 1, 2020.

Stripe already has data on the booked date from the invoice finalization date, amount, and currency, so you can leave these fields blank.

Splitting Stripe payments with additional data

In this example, you use Stripe as your payment processor. You have payments in Stripe, but these payments may represent multiple different goods and services that you want to have custom revenue recognition schedules for.

Suppose you have a payment in Stripe of 100 USD with the ID py_1234 that represents two separate goods and services:

• A 74.99 USD subscription recognized from February 1, 2020 to May 31, 2020.
• A 25.01 USD shipment of materials recognized immediately on a shipment date of January 1, 2020.

To split this Stripe payment, you could provide the following data:

You must specify a unique Split transaction ID for each part of the transactions. This helps us differentiate different parts of a payment with the same ID. The only requirement is that each Split transaction ID is unique.

Stripe already has data on the booked date and currency, so you can leave these fields blank, or fill them in with the correct values. We’ll check that the amounts of each component of the payment add up to the original payment amount, and that the currencies (if specified) stay the same. The descriptions are optional.

Importing external transactions

In this example, you’re migrating to Stripe from a different payment processor or have a multiple payment processor solution.

Suppose you’re migrating your subscriptions to Stripe, and all of them have already been paid for. One of these subscriptions is a yearly subscription from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020 paid for in advance on December 15, 2019 for a price of 100 USD. To import this data into Stripe for revenue recognition purposes, you can provide the following data:

Because Stripe doesn’t have any data on this transaction, you must provide every field except Split transaction ID and the always optional Description. You can also provide a Split transaction ID if that best represents your data.

The currency must be a currency supported on your account in Stripe, but otherwise the data in any of the other fields has no restrictions.

Correcting imported data

If you make a mistake when importing data, you can delete the transaction in the Dashboard, and re-import the correct data to correct the errors. Alternatively, you can upload a new CSV, and any rows with the corresponding Source, Transaction ID, and Split transaction ID to replace the old imported data.

Suppose you have an import like the one below, but want to remove the recognition start and end dates and change the booked date to March 1, 2022.

You can import another CSV with the following format, and it completely replaces the previous row:

The blank fields for Recognition start date and Recognition end date signal that we use the recognition start and end dates for the existing payment, py_1234. The previous incorrect recognition start and end date for the import are no longer used.

Excluding transactions from revenue

You might want to exclude certain transactions from your revenue recognition process because they were erroneously generated due to incorrect settings or are test transactions.

For example, you have five transactions to exclude from your revenue:

• in_1234 – test invoice
• ii_1234 – invoice item incorrectly generated from a subscription update
• in_5678 – invoice that includes multiple line items, of which il_1234 was mistakenly added
• py_1234 – standalone payment created by a problematic integration
• ch_1234 – test standalone charge

To exclude these transactions, download the CSV template for Exclusion Import and fill in the IDs as follows: