How to Reconcile Your Stripe Balance and Activity In Puzzle

A step-by-step guide to verifying that your Puzzle Processor Receivable balances matches your Stripe ending balance at any point in time, and to verify that the activity (including payouts) aligns between systems.

Overview

Stripe’s balance activity is anything that causes your Stripe balance to move up and down — payments, payouts, fees, chargebacks, refunds, and more.

Puzzle automatically records Stripe balance activity into the financial statements through a combination of direct journal entries and subledger journal entries, depending on your accounting settings.

To validate that all your Stripe balance activity is in Puzzle through any given point in time, there are two comparisons:

• Balance comparison (through a selected end date): The Puzzle Balance Sheet (accrual basis) should equal the ending balance shown in your Stripe Balance Summary report for the same period.
• Activity comparison (through a selected date range): The total count and amount of different types of activity (e.g. payments, refunds) should align to the total activity within those groupings in the Puzzle payment processor summary and/or the general ledger.

Within the Puzzle balance sheet (accrual basis view), find the ledger account that corresponds to the Stripe receivable balance.

Start by finding the Stripe balance as Puzzle sees it on the Balance Sheet.

• From the Dashboard, navigate to Financial Statements and click the Balance Sheet tab.

• Set the date range to you want to reconcile. This can be for a defined period (e.g. a month) or through a point in time (e.g. through today — in which case you would display the most recent month, which will have entries through today, if applicable).

  

• Alternatively, you can see the daily (and transaction-level) balance within the General Ledger by including the full history of the account.

Open the Balance summary report in Stripe.

Now open Stripe and pull the matching Balance summary report for the same period.

• Open the Stripe Dashboard (dashboard.stripe.com) and make sure you are in the correct Stripe account.
• In the left navigation, click Balances → Balance summary, or go to Reports → Balance summary).
• Set the date range to match the period and/or end date you are reconciling in Puzzle (e.g., Feb 1, 2026 → Feb 28, 2026). Set the timezone to match your company's timezone (e.g., America – Chicago for Central Time).