Card payments run through Stripe, and the money goes to your Stripe account, not ours. Setting it up is a one-time job that takes about ten minutes if you have your bank details and ID to hand.
1 Start the setup
Before you connect, ClippingCash shows the setup screen with a single action: Start Stripe Connect Setup. Click it and you are handed over to Stripe to complete onboarding.
Stripe asks for what a payment processor is legally required to ask for: your business details, your bank account for payouts, and identity verification. That is Stripe’s requirement, not ours, and it is why you cannot skip it.
Have ready: your legal business name and address, your bank account and routing numbers, and a government ID.
2 Read your account status
Once connected, the management screen shows your account state. Three things matter and they are independent of each other:
- Status, the overall state of the account
- Charges enabled, shown as Enabled or Disabled: whether you can take money in
- Payouts enabled: whether Stripe will send money on to your bank
Charges and payouts are separate, and that trips people up. You can be in a state where charges are enabled and payouts are not, which means customers can pay you but the money sits in Stripe. It is not lost, but it will not reach your bank until you clear whatever Stripe is waiting on.
3 Finish outstanding requirements
If Stripe still needs something, the screen lists the outstanding requirements and gives you a Complete Requirements button that takes you straight to the right place in Stripe to supply it. A partially finished onboarding shows Continue Onboarding instead.
Do not leave these. Unmet requirements are the usual reason money stops moving, and Stripe applies deadlines to some of them.
4 Open your Stripe dashboard
View Stripe Dashboard takes you to Stripe, where you sign in with your own Stripe login. It is not a link that logs you in for you, and that is not a shortcoming: you have a full Stripe account, and ClippingCash genuinely cannot mint a login link for an account it does not control. Accounts whose dashboard the platform controls are the cut-down kind. Yours is not one of those.
Your dashboard is where you go for anything ClippingCash does not surface: disputes, tax documents, changing your payout bank account, detailed transaction records.
Worth understanding: ClippingCash shows you a useful summary, but Stripe is the system of record for the money. If the two ever disagree, Stripe is right.
5 You are the merchant of record
This is the part most operators skim and should not, because it is the difference between this and most software that “handles payments for you”.
When a customer pays a ClippingCash invoice by card, the charge is made on your Stripe account directly. The money does not land with us and get forwarded on. There is no ClippingCash balance holding your money, and there is nothing for us to be slow about paying out, because we never have it.
What that means in practice:
- You are the merchant on the customer’s statement. Your business name, not ours.
- Disputes and chargebacks are yours, raised against your account and handled in your Stripe dashboard. We can help you find the evidence. We cannot decide it for you.
- Refunds come out of your balance, which is why the refund limits are what they are.
- Processing fees are charged to you by Stripe, at Stripe’s standard rate. ClippingCash takes no cut on top.
- The tax side is yours. Stripe reports on your account to you, not through us.
The trade is real and worth saying plainly: you carry the payment relationship, and in exchange nobody sits between you and your own money. If you would rather somebody else carried the chargebacks, this is not the model you want, and that is a legitimate thing to want.
6 Disconnecting
Disconnect Account is there if you need it, and it asks Are you sure you want to disconnect your Stripe account? first.
Disconnecting stops you taking new card payments through ClippingCash. Do not do it as a troubleshooting step, and do not do it mid-season with unpaid invoices carrying pay-now links. If something is wrong, check the requirements list and your Stripe dashboard first.
What it costs
You pay Stripe’s standard processing rate. ClippingCash does not take a cut of your customers’ payments on top of that.
Next: when your money actually arrives explains available versus pending balances and payout timing, which is the question everyone asks second.
Who can do this. Only the owner or an admin can set up or disconnect Stripe payouts or request a payout. A bookkeeper can view balances and payouts. Crew members cannot see them.