We wouldn’t blame you if you think connecting Stripe to NetSuite sounds like the perfect solution for automating revenue reporting. It seems like an easy win. You get all your payment data from Stripe seamlessly flowing into NetSuite, your ERP powerhouse. But as many Accounting and Finance teams discover, this "easy" integration win is full of fails – multiple pitfalls that slow you down, increase costs, and make your revenue data problems even worse.
Our recent fireside chat with Leapfin co-founders Ray Lau (CEO) and Eric Yao (CTO) discussed the specific challenges that come with integrating Stripe with NetSuite. From technical limitations to unexpected costs, there are plenty of reasons why this integration can create more problems than it solves.
Here are the top five reasons you’ll regret connecting Stripe to NetSuite for revenue reporting – and what to do instead.
One of the first hurdles that teams run into is NetSuite’s API concurrency limitations. Meaning: NetSuite limits how many API calls can be made within a day. If your business processes a large volume of transactions, and you’re pushing all of that Stripe data directly into NetSuite, it will take significantly longer than you expect. Bottleneck alert!
"I just heard this from another prospect last week. They have roughly a million transactions per month. They maxed out every single concurrency that NetSuite can offer, and it still takes them two days to pipe all the data in. That’s a big deal for a public company because they can’t even start their revenue close until day three.”
- Ray Lau, CEO, Leapfin
This isn’t an edge case, and it doesn’t only impact companies with millions of transactions per month. Even companies processing hundreds of thousands of transactions annually – tens of thousands monthly – face long delays. We hear stories of businesses having to wait up to 20 days to move data from Stripe to NetSuite. By that point, your month-end close might already be in shambles. So while Stripe’s API makes it easy to collect transactional data, NetSuite’s API struggles to process it in a timely manner, especially at scale.
And by the way, just because Stripe does a good job collecting your transactional data doesn’t mean they do a good job organizing it or making it easy for accountants to work with for rev rec, revenue reporting, or monthly close. These two articles shed some more light:
Read 3 Reasons Stripe Data Isn't Built for Accounting
And 3 Ways Stripe's Out-of-the-Box Reporting Falls Short for Accounting
Companies are blindsided by the hidden costs that come with scaling the Stripe to NetSuite integration. As your transaction volumes grow, so do your costs especially when it comes to data storage and – here’s that word again - API concurrency.
Stripe’s transaction data is notoriously detailed, filled with metadata and custom fields. When all of this data is sent to NetSuite, it quickly eats up storage capacity.
“Stripe has a lot of custom fields and metadata. And yes, those custom fields count towards storage. If you bring all that into NetSuite, it will take up a lot of storage space per transaction. It’s crazy.”
- Eric Yao, CTO, Leapfin
Between unexpected concurrency limitations and storage costs, you might find yourself paying far more than you originally budgeted.
“A CFO told me that their starting cost for NetSuite was $70,000 a year. They asked NetSuite, ‘How much will it cost to get 500,000 orders in annually?’ NetSuite quoted them half a million dollars a year. That’s a 7X increase in cost just for the concurrency and data storage.”
- Ray Lau
While Stripe and NetSuite are both powerful systems, they were built with fundamentally different data models. This makes direct integration a headache for Accounting teams, who often find themselves manually tweaking data to get it into the right format.
A great example of this mismatch is handling disputes. Stripe has a concept of disputes, which occur when a customer disputes a charge, but NetSuite doesn’t. Instead, NetSuite uses credit memos to track this type of adjustment, which introduces complexity and inaccuracies.
“NetSuite does not have a concept of disputes. So, what do you do? You hack around it by using a credit memo. But a credit memo doesn’t work very well, because disputes have multiple outcomes like dispute won or dispute lost.”
- Ray Lau
The lack of compatibility between the two systems creates inefficiencies in the reconciliation process as well. Stripe allows flexibility when it comes to customer data – like having multiple periods in an email address – while NetSuite has stricter formatting rules. That means customer records might get rejected when you try to sync them.
“The data models between Stripe and NetSuite are completely different. There needs to be a logical translation between the two. But when companies try to force a one-to-one mapping, it just doesn’t work.”
- Erik Yao
Reconciliation should be a straightforward process, but when you’re pushing raw Stripe data into NetSuite, it quickly becomes a mess. Stripe uses bulk payouts that cover thousands of individual transactions, while NetSuite expects a more granular level of detail. This mismatch can lead to major reconciliation issues, requiring hours of manual work to diagnose discrepancies.
“One of our customers was trying to reconcile payouts from Stripe with NetSuite. They tried to mass-apply payments to tens of thousands of transactions at once, and NetSuite just couldn’t handle it. The system crashed every time.”
- Erik Yao
Even something as simple as matching payouts to payments can turn into a full-time job. With large volumes of data coming in from Stripe, it’s easy for mismatches to go unnoticed until the very end of the close process. By then, the clock is ticking, and the reconciliation errors can snowball into even bigger problems.
The inability to run reconciliation reports in real-time only makes matters worse. NetSuite wasn’t designed to handle such high volumes of transaction data, meaning that even basic reports like AR aging become slow, if not impossible, to run.
While Stripe may be your main payment processor today, chances are, it won’t be the only one you use as your business scales. Companies that expand internationally or into mobile payments often add other payment service providers (PSPs) like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Adyen. Each of these systems comes with its own data format and complexities, making the integration with NetSuite even more complicated.
“Stripe is great for the U.S. and Canada, but once you move into Europe or other international markets, you’re likely going to use something like Adyen. What do you do then? Do you pipe that into NetSuite, too? If Stripe was already giving you problems, adding another PSP will just multiply the complexity.”
- Ray Lau
The issue isn’t just with new payment processors, either. As companies grow, and as more systems are layered into the stack and NetSuite integration, the risk of data inconsistencies grows exponentially.
If connecting Stripe to NetSuite sounds like a recipe for disaster, that’s because it often is. Between API limitations, rising costs, and fundamental data incompatibilities, the integration can become a significant drain on time, money, and resources. And for businesses processing hundreds of thousands or even millions of transactions, the challenges only get worse.
So, what’s the alternative? The solution lies in treating – or transforming – your Stripe data before it hits your ERP system. Leapfin automates the transformation of raw Stripe data into clean journal entries, posting summarized entries into NetSuite. Your ERP system is happy because it’s receiving only the data it needs and expects. And your team is happy because you’ve eliminated the headaches of trying to reconcile complex transaction data manually.
“At the end of the day, NetSuite is a general ledger. It’s great for financial reporting, but it’s not a data warehouse. You need something like Leapfin to handle all the transaction data transformations before you put anything into NetSuite.”
- Ray Lau
Don’t let your Stripe-to-NetSuite integration become your team’s worst nightmare. Instead, take control of your revenue data with an automated solution designed to scale with your business.
Ready to see more about how Leapfin can solve your revenue data problems? Choose how you prefer to learn:
Request a live demo with our team
Or watch this 2-minute explainer video, made specifically for Stripe users 👇