Stripe Organizations: access and reports across accounts

What is a Stripe organization?

It's a way to manage several Stripe accounts as one business. Stripe describes it as giving you "a centralized view in the Stripe Dashboard of all of your business lines or subsidiaries." From the organization you can:

• See transactions, disputes, invoices, connected accounts and customers across every account.
• Download reports that combine the accounts.
• Manage team members and single sign-on in one place.
• Search across all the accounts a team member can reach.
• Group accounts into account groups, such as a region or a business unit, and filter reports by group.

Stripe's own examples are global expansion, separate business units, franchise groups and acquired companies that already use Stripe.

An organization isn't an account. Stripe's words: "An organization doesn't conduct its own business through Stripe. It acts as a container structure to view and manage the operation of its separate businesses." It has no balance and takes no payments.

Can you have multiple Stripe accounts?

Yes, and for separate legal entities you must. Stripe says you can only associate each account "with the tax ID and legal entity of one business." If you run businesses with separate tax IDs, "you must create additional accounts for each." (Stripe: multiple separate accounts)

The rule runs one way. Several accounts can share one legal entity, for example separate projects or websites of the same business. One account can't hold two entities. A group with Denver LLC, Phoenix LLC and Portland LLC needs at least three accounts.

You can create a new account from the account picker in the Dashboard. A new account starts on Stripe's standard policies and pricing. It doesn't inherit anything special about your existing account.

What does an organization share across accounts?

• Team access. Organization-level roles apply to every account in the organization. Account-level roles apply to one account. Roles set at the organization are inherited by each account, so you can't make someone an administrator of the organization and view-only on one of its accounts.
• Single sign-on. When you create the organization, the SSO setup of its accounts moves to the organization.
• Reports. Reports show all accounts combined by default, with filters for accounts, dates and currency. You can download consolidated Balance, Payout reconciliation and Fees reports, as one summed report, one combined file or a separate file per account. You need a role with download permission in each account.
• Search and Sigma. Team members can search, and run SQL queries in Sigma, across the accounts they can reach.

Sharing customers and saved payment methods across accounts is a separate feature, in public preview. It needs your customers' consent, and once it's on for an account it can't be turned off without contacting Stripe. Even then, Stripe says accounts "can't see each other's payments."

What stays separate in each account?

Everything that makes it a business on Stripe:

• The legal entity and tax ID, one business per account.
• Public business details and the statement descriptor, so a customer sees the name of the business they bought from.
• Payouts. Each account can pay out to its own bank account, though they can share one.
• Subscriptions and products. Stripe's multi-entity billing guide says each account "maintains its own customers, subscriptions, and product catalog."
• Customers and saved payment methods, unless you turn on sharing, which covers only those two.
• Billing settings. Stripe's guide says invoice templates, subscription lifecycles and dunning emails are set up for each account.

How do you create a Stripe organization?

From the Dashboard:

1. Open the account picker, select Create, then Create organization.
2. Name the organization.
3. Select the accounts to add, up to 75.
4. Agree to the terms, then click Create.

The person creating it must be a Super Administrator of every account added. The account owner has that role by default and can give it to someone else. Accounts with SSO need their identity providers consolidated first. India Stripe accounts aren't eligible yet.

After that, you can add existing accounts or create new ones inside the organization. A new account can copy the legal entity, business details or payout bank account from another account in the organization. Each account can belong to only one organization. Removing every account closes the organization.

Does an organization decide which account a customer pays?

No. The organization groups the accounts. It doesn't route payments. A customer still pays one account, and the payment lands in that account's balance and pays out to its bank.

Stripe's guide on billing for a multi-entity business says so directly: "You create a service on your app to route customers to the right account when they check out." Its recommended setup is a platform account with a connected account for each line of business, using Stripe Connect. (Stripe: billing for a multi-entity business)

When sales runs from one CRM portal, that routing has to happen between the deal and the checkout. Something has to read the deal and know that a Phoenix sale goes to Phoenix LLC's account. If it doesn't, the payment lands in the wrong entity and becomes an intercompany transaction both sets of books must record and settle. A HubSpot account connects one Stripe account, which is covered in Multiple Stripe accounts in HubSpot.

How does an organization fit with centralized billing?

It's the payments side of centralized billing: one team working across several entities' accounts, with the money still landing in each entity's own account. On the accounting side, each entity keeps its own books. See QuickBooks multiple companies and multi-entity accounting.