Stripe pays you the net. Your books need the gross.
Book the payout and you understate revenue by the fee, compute VAT on the wrong base, and never reclaim the input tax. Datevbridge routes every charge, fee and payout through a clearing account and exports a Buchungsstapel your Steuerberater can import.
500 transactions a month on the free tier. Read-only Stripe access.
1360 Geldtransit
März 2026
Soll
Haben
- Erlöse (brutto)
- 490,00 EUR
- darin USt. 19 %
- 78,24 EUR
- Gebühren als Aufwand
- 13,81 EUR
The clearing account nets to zero once the payout lands. That zero is the check: if it is not zero, something is genuinely missing.
The Brutto-Netto trap
One missing line, three wrong numbers.
A customer pays 100,00 €. Stripe keeps 2,90 € and transfers 97,10 €. If your bookkeeping records the 97,10 € that arrived, then three separate figures are wrong at once: revenue is short by the fee, the VAT contained in that revenue is short with it, and the fee was never booked as an expense, so its input tax is never reclaimed.
None of this fails loudly. The books balance, the bank reconciles, and the error compounds quietly for as long as the integration runs — until a Betriebsprüfung asks why declared turnover does not match the payment provider’s records.
The fix is old and boring: a Geldtransit account. Every gross charge debits it, every fee and payout credits it, and its balance is exactly what Stripe is holding. When the payout clears, it is zero — and that zero is a check you can run at any time.
How it works
Connect, sync, export. Nothing writes to Stripe.
Connect a read-only Stripe key
A restricted key with read access to balance transactions. We never need write access, and the key is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM.
Sync a period
We import balance transactions — the only Stripe object that carries the fee alongside the gross amount. Re-running a sync imports only what is new; overlapping windows are safe.
Export a Buchungsstapel
A DATEV EXTF file, Windows-1252, 125 columns, format version 13. Your Steuerberater imports it directly. The clearing balance is shown before you download.
"EXTF";700;21;"Buchungsstapel";13;20260401090000000;;"SF";…
Umsatz (ohne Soll/Haben-Kz);Soll/Haben-Kennzeichen;…;Abw. Skontokonto
100,00;"S";;;;;1360;8400;"3";0203;"ch_1A2b";;;"Invoice RE-1001";…
2,90;"S";;;;;4970;1360;"";0203;"ch_1A2b";;;"Stripe Gebühr";…
476,19;"S";;;;;1200;1360;"";2803;"po_9Z8y";;;"Stripe Auszahlung";…What we guarantee
A file that imports, or an error that says why.
The format is matched, not approximated
The 125 column names and the 31-field header are transcribed from a real DATEV export, and the test suite reproduces that file byte for byte. One renamed column and an import is rejected — so it is checked on every build.
Windows-1252, not UTF-8
DATEV reads ANSI. The column headers even contain an en dash, which is byte 0x96 in Windows-1252 and does not exist in ISO-8859-1. Writing UTF-8 turns Größe into Größe inside the accounting system.
Exact decimal arithmetic
Amounts are scaled integers, never floats. A thousand transactions of one cent come to exactly 10,00 — and the sign lives in the Soll/Haben column, never in the amount, so a booking cannot post twice in the same direction.
Every booking traces back
The Stripe transaction id travels into a DATEV Zusatzinformation column, so any line in the ledger can be traced to the payment that produced it without leaving the accounting system.
Where this stands
New service. Verified format. Not tax advice.
The EXTF writer is checked on every build against a real DATEV export — header, all 125 column names, encoding and line endings. The reconciliation engine is checked by asserting that the clearing account nets to Stripe’s own balance across a month of charges, refunds, fees, a chargeback and a payout.
What we will not claim: that the default account mapping is right for your business. SKR03 and SKR04 defaults are a starting point and every account is overridable. Confirm the mapping with your Steuerberater before you rely on it — we are a format and arithmetic tool, not an accountant.