Connecting payments and accounting to your website (Stripe, Xero, MYOB)

The moment your website can take money, two questions follow: how does the payment go through, and how does it end up in your accounts without someone typing it in twice. Done well, both happen the instant a customer pays. Done badly, you've got a payment gateway over here, a pile of invoices to raise over there, and a bookkeeper reconciling it all by hand at month end.

Connecting payments to your accounting closes that loop. A customer pays on your site, and the sale, the receipt and the GST are already in your books before you've thought about it.

Taking the payment

The first half is the payment gateway, the service that actually processes the card. For most Australian businesses we reach for one of:

• Stripe for cards and Apple Pay or Google Pay on the site itself. Flexible, developer-friendly, the default for custom checkouts and bookings.
• Square if you also take payments in person and want online and in-store under one roof.
• PayPal as an added option at checkout, because some customers simply prefer it.

These plug into a custom site, a Shopify store, or a booking flow that needs a deposit. Card details never touch your server, which keeps you out of the messy parts of payment compliance.

Getting it into your accounting

The second half is the sync to your accounting software, and it's the bit that saves the most time. When a payment succeeds, an API call raises the matching invoice or receipt in your accounts:

• Xero, the common choice for Australian small business
• MYOB, long-established here and still widely used
• QuickBooks, especially where a bookkeeper already works in it

So a $440 payment on the site becomes a paid invoice in Xero, with the line items and GST already split out. Reconciliation goes from a chore to a glance.

The Australian specifics

A few things matter locally, and we set them up so they're handled rather than an afterthought:

• GST. Tax is calculated and recorded correctly, so your invoices and your BAS reflect reality without manual adjustment.
• Tax invoices. Customers get a compliant tax invoice automatically, which is what they need to claim the expense.
• AUD and local methods. Pricing in Australian dollars, with the payment methods Australians actually use.

A quick example

A studio sells a block of ten classes through its website for $300:

• the customer pays by card via Stripe
• a paid tax invoice for $300, GST included, is created in Xero
• the sale is categorised, ready to reconcile against the bank feed
• the customer gets their invoice by email straight away

No invoice to raise, no number to re-key, no month-end pile. The same flow handles a deposit taken at booking just as easily.

Where to start

If you're raising invoices by hand for payments your site already takes, this is low-hanging fruit. Get a free website audit and we'll show you how to close the loop, or read the wider view in website integrations explained.