How to Automate Stripe

Stripe is where the money actually lands

Stripe is the payments infrastructure behind an enormous number of online businesses, and it holds the events that matter most: a payment succeeded, a payment failed, a subscription renewed, a customer disputed a charge.

It is unusually good software, and it is genuinely automatable. That is what makes the gap around it interesting rather than obvious.

Because Stripe knows about money and nothing else. It knows a card was declined. It does not know that the customer behind it is halfway through onboarding, has a delivery booked for Thursday, and is in a shared inbox thread with your support team about something unrelated.

Every consequence of a payment event happens outside Stripe, in systems Stripe has never heard of.

So the events are perfect and the follow-through is manual, which is an unusual place for a business to be leaking.

A failed payment is only a problem if nobody notices

The revenue that leaks from a small business rarely leaves in a lump. It goes one failed card at a time.

A subscription payment fails in the night. Stripe retries, politely, and eventually gives up. The customer keeps their access because the account system was never told. Two months later somebody notices during a reconciliation and there is now an awkward conversation and two months of service to write off.

The same shape appears everywhere. A payout arrives and nobody matches it against the ledger until quarter end. A dispute is opened and the deadline to submit evidence passes because the email went to an address nobody watches.

None of this is a Stripe failure. Stripe did its job and raised the event. The gap is that nothing downstream was listening.

A hundred pounds a month, unnoticed for a year, is the kind of number that only shows up when somebody finally sits down with two screens open.

Stripe

Failures that reach a person The customers whose payment failed, named and listed, before they notice their access still works.

Payouts reconciled What Stripe paid out matched against what the books recorded, with the gap flagged the same week.

Action in the other systems The account, the CRM and the delivery list updated to match what actually happened to the money.

Webhooks fire for events Stripe can see

Stripe's automation is a long way ahead of most of what it connects to.

Billing runs subscriptions, proration and invoices. Smart Retries pick the moment to retry a failed card using its own data. Dunning emails chase customers automatically. Webhooks fire on every event so your own software can react. The dashboard schedules reports and Sigma queries the data directly.

The catch is on the receiving end. A webhook needs something built to catch it, and reacting to it usefully means writing code against every other system involved, each of which needs an API that may not exist.

So the small business that is exactly the size to be hurt by leaking revenue is the one least likely to have the developer needed to close the loop. The events fire perfectly and land nowhere.

The consequence can be carried into the other systems

Stripe knows a payment failed within seconds. The account system, the ledger and the customer record find out when somebody gets round to telling them, and nothing about that telling requires a person.

The failed subscriptions listed each morning with the customer, the amount and how many attempts have already gone by, checked against the account system to see who still has access they are no longer paying for. The payouts matched against the ledger, with any difference named while it is still small enough to explain.

The disputes surfaced with their deadlines, so evidence is submitted by a person who knows the customer rather than discovered after the window shut. The refunds recorded in the accounting package rather than sitting only in Stripe.

Draw the line at money leaving and at customers being told. Assembling the list, comparing the numbers and updating internal systems can run unattended. Issuing a refund, cancelling an account or emailing a customer about their card should have a person deciding.

Reconciling across systems is nobody's favourite hour

Stripe will tell you what happened. Doing something about it in four other systems is the part that keeps getting postponed.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It reads the Stripe dashboard, opens the account system, the CRM or the accounting package, and lines up what each one says so the gaps are visible and the follow-ups are ready.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it. Anything that moves money or reaches a customer waits for a person.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.