Stripe is payments infrastructure for businesses of every size, founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison and run from dual headquarters in San Francisco and Dublin. Businesses running on it processed $1.9 trillion in 2025, up 34% on the year before.
It started with card payments and now covers most of the money side of a business: Checkout and Payment Links for taking payments, Billing and Invoicing for recurring charges, Tax for VAT, Radar for fraud, Terminal for in-person sales, and Connect for platforms that pay other sellers.
Payment methods in the UK
Stripe offers access to more than 125 payment methods. In the UK that includes cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay, Klarna, and Bacs Direct Debit for recurring payments from UK bank accounts.
Pay by Bank, Stripe’s first open banking payment method, launched in the UK in May 2024, and it works with Billing for subscriptions since February 2026. Stripe’s own wallet, Link, saves customers’ details for a faster checkout next time.
Matching payouts to sales in the books
UK businesses are paid out on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule, or by hand when they choose. Funds normally settle in three business days, and a manual payout in pounds requested before 5pm London time can arrive the same day.
Each automatic payout settles a batch: the payments that became available since the last one, less Stripe’s fees and anything refunded or disputed in between. So one deposit in the bank can stand for dozens of sales, and no single sale matches it.
The payout reconciliation report matches each payout that lands in the bank with the individual payments and deductions inside it. It works on automatic payouts only. A manual payout isn’t tied to particular transactions, so accounts on manual payouts reconcile against the Stripe balance instead, the way they would a bank account.
Xero builds its own Stripe connection. It puts a Pay button on Xero invoices and adds a Stripe feed, so Stripe transactions flow into Xero and card payments and their fees are matched to the right invoices automatically. Sales taken through a web shop or Stripe Checkout never started life as Xero invoices, so those payments have nothing to match. They usually go in as one summary per day, which the payout then clears.
Refunds and disputes in Xero
A refund comes out of the available Stripe balance, so it reaches the bank as a smaller payout, sometimes weeks after the sale it reverses. Stripe keeps the processing fee from the original payment. If the balance can’t cover a card refund, the refund waits as pending until it can.
A card dispute moves faster. Stripe takes the disputed amount and a dispute fee from the balance as soon as it opens, and the money stays held while the card issuer decides, which can take two to three months. If the business wins, the amount goes back into the balance and leaves in a later payout. In Xero, that’s one sale whose money goes out in one month and may come back in another.
Payouts in more than one currency
By default, Stripe converts everything it receives into the account’s main currency. A UK account can instead hold and pay out up to 18 currencies, with a separate bank account for each one. On the default setting, a €100 sale arrives in pounds at that day’s rate while its Xero invoice still says €100, and the difference becomes a currency gain or loss.
Stripe’s API
Stripe’s REST API is one of the most widely used in software. Since September 2024, Stripe has shipped new versions monthly without breaking changes, with a larger named release twice a year. The current one is called Endive.
Every account has test and live keys, and Stripe recommends restricted keys that give each integration only the access it needs. Up to five sandboxes sit alongside the live account for testing. The live API handles up to 100 requests a second.
Webhooks and data
Webhooks report events such as a successful payment, a refund or a payout reaching the bank. Each one is signed, and in live mode Stripe keeps retrying a failed delivery for up to three days.
For reporting, Sigma runs SQL queries inside the dashboard, and Data Pipeline sends all of an account’s Stripe data to a data warehouse without code.
Stripe in AI assistants
In September 2025, Stripe and OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, built on an open protocol for AI agents to buy on a shopper’s behalf.
Stripe also runs an official MCP server, with Stripe connectors for Claude and ChatGPT, so an assistant can look up payments and payouts in plain language. Some actions taken that way, refunds among them, wait for a person to approve them in Stripe first.
Where Stripe’s money goes next
Stripe sits in the middle of the money, so there’s a lot it can feed. A successful payment can raise the invoice in Xero, a failed subscription charge can open a task in the CRM, and each payout can be broken back into the sales and fees inside it before it reaches the books.
Where to start depends on where the hours go today. If month-end still means matching payouts to orders with a spreadsheet open, that habit’s usual cost and the ROI math put a number on it.