Payment Not Showing in Stripe

GetCost shows the payment as received, but you cannot find it in your Stripe dashboard. In almost every case the payment is there - you are looking at a different Stripe account.

Why this happens

You sign in to Stripe with your own Stripe credentials - GetCost cannot sign you in on your behalf. That means going to Stripe's website directly opens whichever account your browser session last had selected, which is not necessarily the account connected to GetCost.

If those two are different, everything looks alarming and everything is actually fine: GetCost correctly reports the payment, and Stripe correctly reports a zero balance, because they are describing two different accounts.

Watch for this: a zero balance and an empty transaction list are what a healthy but unrelated Stripe account looks like. An empty dashboard is not evidence that a payment failed.

Find the right account

  1. Open Settings | Payment | Stripe

    The top of the page shows the status of the account connected to GetCost, and its email address when Stripe provides one. That email is the login that opens the right account.

  2. Use the Open your Stripe dashboard button

    Use this button rather than typing Stripe's address into your browser. It points at this account by name, so it opens the account connected to GetCost instead of whichever one Stripe happened to have selected.

  3. Check the account switcher

    If Stripe opens somewhere unexpected, use the account switcher at the top left of the Stripe dashboard. Businesses you belong to are listed there, and switching to the right one brings the payments into view.

  4. If the account is not in the list, sign in with the other email

    The switcher only shows accounts belonging to the login you are currently using. If the account you need is not there, sign out of Stripe completely and sign back in with the email shown in GetCost.

Tip: if Stripe says you do not have access to the account the button opens, that is useful information rather than an error - it means you are signed in as someone who is not a member of the connected account.

Where a second account comes from

Most people are surprised to learn they have more than one. The usual reasons:

🛠

You reconnected Stripe

Disconnecting and connecting again - often when changing your business name - can create and connect a new Stripe account.

📋

A previous business

An account from an earlier company name is still there, still signed in, and still the one your browser opens by default.

👤

Someone else set one up

A bookkeeper, accountant, or partner created an account and added you to it, so your login now reaches more than one business.

📩

Two Stripe logins

You signed up to Stripe twice with different email addresses, and only one of them is connected to GetCost.

Important: payments always stay in the account that took them. If you reconnected Stripe at some point, older payments remain in the previous account and new payments go to the current one. Neither set is lost, but they live in two places.

If it is still missing

If you have confirmed you are in the account GetCost names and the payment genuinely is not there, contact support with:

  • The invoice number the payment was applied to.
  • The date and amount of the payment.
  • The email address you use to sign in to GetCost.
Note: please write from the email address registered on your GetCost account. Payment questions involve account details, so support has to confirm it is speaking to the account holder before discussing them. Messaging from the chat inside the app does this automatically.

Found the payment in Stripe, but not in your bank?

That is a different question with a much more common answer - see Payment Not in Your Bank Account.