How to Customize & Manage Stripe Payment Reports

Stripe payment reports are the downloadable records on the Reports page of your Stripe Dashboard, and you customize them by picking a date range and choosing which columns go into the export.

For a WordPress site, the most useful column is one Stripe doesn’t show by default: the metadata your payment plugin attached to each payment.

WP Simple Pay writes the payment form’s ID into the metadata of every payment, on the free Lite version too. Add that as a column, and a Stripe export can finally tell you which form on your site brought in each payment.

Below, I’ll cover the two free reports most site owners need, how to get your own form data into them, and the WordPress-specific traps that make the totals look wrong: test payments, the Lite version’s 3% fee, and the numbers WordPress shows you.

Which Stripe Payment Reports Do You Need?

Stripe currently offers two financial reports at no extra cost: the Balance summary and Payout reconciliation.

It also sells two advanced tools, Revenue Recognition and Bank Reconciliation, plus Sigma for custom SQL reports, according to Stripe’s reports overview.

Here’s how they line up against the questions a small business owner usually asks:

Report	The question it answers	Where to find it
Balance summary	What moved my Stripe balance this month?	Reports page in the Stripe Dashboard
Payout reconciliation	Which payments make up this bank deposit?	Reports page in the Stripe Dashboard
All fees	What did Stripe charge me, and for what?	Reports » All fees
Billing overview	What’s my MRR and subscriber churn?	Billing in the Stripe Dashboard
Revenue Recognition (paid)	How much of this revenue have I earned yet?	Revenue recognition in the Stripe Dashboard
Sigma (paid)	Anything you can write as a SQL query	Sigma in the Stripe Dashboard

If you sell services or one-off products through a WordPress form, the first two reports cover almost everything you’ll need at tax time.

How to Read the Stripe Balance Report

The Balance summary works like a bank statement for your Stripe account.

It’s split into three sections: Balance summary, Balance change from activity, and Payouts.

The first section shows your starting and ending balance for the date range you pick, including funds that are available, pending, or held in reserve.

The second section breaks down what changed the balance in between, such as charges, refunds, disputes, and fees.

From there, you can set the Date range and Timezone, then use Export to save the report as a CSV or a PDF.

Stripe’s Dashboard reports only cover complete days. Each day’s data is ready by noon the following day in the report’s time zone, per Stripe’s report options documentation.

So if you pull this morning’s numbers before lunch, yesterday’s payments may not be in them yet.

How to Match Stripe Payouts to Your Bank Deposits

The Payout reconciliation report answers the question your bookkeeper will ask first: which payments make up the deposit that just landed in your bank account?

It lists every transaction inside each payout, so a $1,240 deposit stops being a mystery number and turns into the twelve payments, two refunds, and fees behind it.

Before you rely on it, check one setting in your Stripe account. This report only works with automatic payouts, and Stripe can’t reconcile instant payouts with it.

The itemized version includes balance_transaction_id and available_on columns by default.

You can also add optional columns like source_id and subscription_id, which helps if your WordPress site sells both one-time services and recurring plans.

In the test account below, two payments haven’t been paid out yet, so they sit under Ending balance reconciliation rather than under Payout reconciliation.

Customize Stripe Reports With Your WordPress Form Data

Stripe’s itemized reports can include a column for any metadata key on your payments, written as payment_metadata[key]. The Stripe metadata reporting docs explain that it reads from the PaymentIntent first, then falls back to the charge.

Your WordPress payment plugin is the thing writing that metadata. So the columns you can add depend on what your plugin sends to Stripe.

Add the Form ID Column to Your Export

WP Simple Pay writes simpay_form_id to every payment it creates, on every license, including Lite.

To add it, click Export on an itemized section of the Balance summary or Payout reconciliation report, then choose Download to system.

Next, set Columns to Custom, and type simpay into the column search box.

From there, tick simpay_form_id under Payment Metadata, and you’ll also see the price and quantity keys the plugin sends.

Your export now has a payment_metadata[simpay_form_id] column, and you can match each ID to the form with that number under WP Simple Pay » Payment Forms.

Stripe caps exports at 100 metadata keys, and the key list is fixed once you hit that limit. If you’ve used several plugins on one Stripe account over the years, it’s worth keeping your keys tidy.

Name Your Custom Fields Before the First Payment

Custom form fields go to Stripe too, which means a phone number, a session date, or a “How did you hear about us?” answer can become a report column.

Each custom field in the form builder has a Stripe Metadata Label setting. The plugin describes it as the label “used to identify this field within Stripe payment records,” and it never appears on the form itself.

If you leave that label blank, the plugin falls back to a generated key like simpay-form-12-field-3. That works, but it’s hard to read in a spreadsheet six months later.

So before you publish a form, give every field a short, plain label like session_date or referral_source.

Sending custom field values to Stripe is available in every WP Simple Pay Pro plan, not in Lite. The WP Simple Pay guide to custom field values in Stripe shows where they appear on each payment.

Set a Readable Transaction Description

The description column is the other place your WordPress form shows up in a Stripe report.

Each payment form has a Transaction Description setting on its General tab, with the options Auto (default), Form Title, Form Description, Price Option Label, and Custom.

On Auto (default), the plugin uses the price option label if one is set, otherwise, the form title.

If two forms share a price label like “Standard,” switching one of them to Form Title or Custom keeps their rows apart in your export. The transaction description doc walks through each option.

How to Schedule Stripe Reports Instead of Downloading Them

If you download the same report every month, you can have Stripe run it for you.

The Schedule… button under each report’s title lets you run it daily, weekly, or monthly. When the file is ready, Stripe sends you an email notification, and you download it from the Dashboard.

So the email tells you the report is waiting, but the file itself stays in Stripe.

I’d schedule the Payout reconciliation report monthly with your metadata columns already saved, so the same layout lands every month without re-ticking boxes.

When the Paid Stripe Reports Are Worth It

Most WordPress sites taking payments through a form never need to pay for reporting. There are two exceptions worth knowing about.

Revenue Recognition automates accrual accounting under ASC 606 and IFRS 15. That matters when you’re paid up front for something you deliver over time, like an annual membership or a 12-week coaching program.

Since August 2025, it’s sold as a monthly subscription plus a percentage of volume, with a 30-day free trial for new users.

Sigma lets you write SQL queries against your Stripe data, with an AI assistant that helps draft them. Pricing scales with your charge count, starting at $10 a month on an annual contract for up to 250 charges.

If you sell subscriptions, check the free Billing overview before paying for either. It already tracks MRR, active subscribers, churn, and trial conversion.

If you haven’t set up recurring billing yet, here’s how to accept recurring payments in WordPress.

Why Your Stripe Reports Don’t Match What You Expected

When a Stripe report doesn’t match what you expected, two WordPress-specific causes are worth ruling out first.

Test Payments Live in a Separate Place

Payments you make while WP Simple Pay is in test mode go to Stripe’s test environment, which keeps its data apart from your live account.

So if you ran a dozen test checkouts to make sure your form worked, they won’t inflate your live reports. They also won’t show up when you go looking for them in live mode.

WP Simple Pay follows the same split inside WordPress, and its reports only show payments from whichever mode the site is in right now. Here’s how to turn Stripe test mode on and off in WordPress.

WP Simple Pay Lite’s 3% Fee is Listed Apart from Stripe’s Fee

On most new connections, WP Simple Pay Lite adds a 3% application fee to each transaction, on top of Stripe’s own processing fee. Stripe accounts based in Brazil, India, or Mexico are excluded.

Stripe records that 3% as an application fee, separate from its own fee, in each payment’s fee breakdown.

So if your net payouts look about 3% lower than you’d expect, check the fee details on one of those payments before you assume something’s broken.

Any WP Simple Pay Pro license removes the 3% fee, and it comes off existing subscriptions too once the license is activated. Stripe’s own processing fee still applies to every payment either way.

Does WP Simple Pay charge any fees? has the full breakdown, and if you’d rather your customers cover Stripe’s fee, here’s how to pass Stripe fees on to your customers.

Getting Stripe Reports Into QuickBooks, Xero, or Google Sheets

Stripe still has a built-in QuickBooks export, but it only fits one version of QuickBooks.

Stripe’s IIF export lives in Legacy exports settings, and Stripe’s accounting integrations says plainly that IIF files can’t be imported into QuickBooks Online. It’s a QuickBooks Desktop format.

For QuickBooks Online or Xero, Stripe points you to apps in the Stripe App Marketplace, such as QuickBooks Sync by Acodei and Xero’s own sync app.

If you’d rather keep a running spreadsheet, the Automations tab on each WP Simple Pay form connects to Uncanny Automator, which can add a row to Google Sheets for every payment. Here’s how to connect WordPress payment forms with Google Sheets.

What WordPress Shows You, and What It Doesn’t

You don’t have to log in to Stripe for a quick check on how payments are going.

Under WP Simple Pay » Activity & Reports, the Today card shows Gross Volume, Successful Payments, Customers, and All Payments, plus your top five forms by volume.

Below that, you’ll find the last 10 payments and a Reports card with Gross Volume and Successful Payments charts. The Report range dropdown offers preset ranges from Today through Last 12 months, plus Month to date, Year to date, and Custom.

The step-by-step tour lives in how to get Stripe Dashboard payment reports in WordPress.

If you’d rather have the numbers come to you, the Summary Report email under WP Simple Pay » Settings » Emails sends the same stats and a Top Forms table. You can set its Frequency to Weekly or Monthly.

These WordPress figures come from the plugin’s own transaction records, which Stripe’s webhooks keep up to date, not from your Stripe ledger.

The plugin is upfront about it, and its Dashboard widget says the amounts “do not represent verified financial data.” So use the WordPress view for a quick check, and use Stripe’s reports for your books and your taxes.

In between the two sits WP Simple Pay » Transactions, which has an Export to CSV bulk action plus Filter by payment form and Filter by payment mode dropdowns.

It only exports the rows you tick, and the list shows 20 per page, so it’s handy for a single form’s recent payments rather than a full year.

A Monthly Stripe Reporting Routine for a Small WordPress Business

Here’s the routine I’d set up for a consultant or small service business selling through two or three WordPress forms:

1. Weekly: read the WP Simple Pay Summary Report email to spot a form that’s suddenly gone quiet.
2. Monthly: download the Payout reconciliation report with payment_metadata[simpay_form_id] and your custom field columns added, and hand it to whoever does your books.
3. Monthly: open Radar analytics in Stripe and check the Fraud and Disputes panels to see how your dispute rate is trending.
4. Quarterly: compare revenue per form across the last three exports, and retire or rework the forms that aren’t pulling their weight.

For the fraud side, here are the Stripe features that protect a WordPress store from holiday fraud.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Can I see which WordPress form a Stripe payment came from?

Yes, if your plugin writes a form identifier to the payment’s metadata. WP Simple Pay adds simpay_form_id to every payment, including on Lite. When you export an itemized Stripe report, set Columns to Custom and tick it under Payment Metadata, and it appears as a payment_metadata[simpay_form_id] column.

2. Why don’t my test payments show up in Stripe reports?

Test payments go to Stripe’s test environment, which is kept separate from live mode. Your live Balance and Payout reconciliation reports only include real payments. To see test transactions, switch your Stripe Dashboard to test mode, or put WP Simple Pay in test mode and open Activity & Reports.

3. Can Stripe email me reports automatically?

Stripe can run a report on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule and email you when it’s ready. You still download the file from the Dashboard. For a payments summary sent straight to your inbox, WP Simple Pay’s Summary Report email runs weekly or monthly.

4. Can I export Stripe reports to QuickBooks Online?

Not with Stripe’s built-in export. The IIF file under Legacy exports only imports into QuickBooks Desktop. For QuickBooks Online, Stripe points you to apps in the Stripe App Marketplace, such as QuickBooks Sync by Acodei.

Final Thoughts

Stripe’s free Balance summary and Payout reconciliation reports cover what most WordPress businesses need, as long as the plugin taking the payments sends useful data with them.

If you want custom field answers as report columns and no 3% fee in your exports, WP Simple Pay Pro does both. For more background on the platform itself, read what Stripe is and how it can help your business, or these lesser-known facts about Stripe.

What are you waiting for? Get started with WP Simple Pay today!

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