How the Stripe Integration Works in RunSmart

RunSmart’s Stripe integration connects your Stripe Billing data with your broader financial forecasting in RunSmart.

Instead of looking only at total historical revenue, RunSmart uses your Stripe subscription activity to help you understand and forecast what is happening at the product or SKU level, including subscriber growth, churn, recurring revenue, expansion, contraction, and future subscription revenue.
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When you connect Stripe, RunSmart imports subscription and billing information from your Stripe account and uses it to create a dedicated Subscriptions (Stripe) view within your Sales Forecast.
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This allows you to:

This gives subscription businesses a more detailed way to understand the drivers behind future revenue instead of forecasting total sales as a single number.
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Yes.

QuickBooks Online must be connected to the RunSmart project before Stripe can be added.

QuickBooks provides the broader company financial data that RunSmart combines with Stripe subscription activity for analysis and forecasting.
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Stripe is connected separately for each RunSmart project.

To connect Stripe:

Once the connection is complete, Stripe will appear under Add'l Integrations with a Connected status.

The + New Integration option only appears after QuickBooks Online has been connected because RunSmart uses QuickBooks as the primary source for your company-level financial information and combines it with Stripe subscription data.

To disconnect Stripe from your RunSmart project, click the door exit icon. Syncing will stop immediately, but your previously synced Stripe data will be retained for 45 days in case you reconnect. After 45 days, the data will be permanently deleted.

If you request that your Stripe data be deleted immediately, it will be permanently removed without waiting for the 45-day period.

No.

RunSmart connects to Stripe with read-only access. This allows RunSmart to securely retrieve the subscription and billing information needed for analysis and forecasting, but it does not allow RunSmart to create charges, issue refunds, change subscriptions, modify customers, change prices, create invoices, or make other changes to your Stripe account.
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Stripe data is refreshed alongside your RunSmart QuickBooks data refresh.

The integration is not intended to function as a real-time Stripe dashboard. RunSmart uses refreshed Stripe data to support financial analysis and forward-looking forecasting.
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RunSmart uses information related to your:

RunSmart maintains the relationship between products, prices, customers, subscriptions, and billing activity so that subscription activity can be analyzed over time.

A subscriber is a unique customer with at least one active paid subscription.

A customer is counted once even if that customer has multiple subscriptions.

For example, if one customer subscribes to both Product A and Product B, RunSmart does not treat that customer as two separate company-level subscribers simply because two subscriptions exist.

Subscriber counts are based on subscription status rather than invoice activity.

This is important because billing frequency does not necessarily indicate whether a customer is still an active subscriber. For example, a customer on an annual subscription remains active throughout the subscription period even though they may only receive one invoice during the year.

Active Subscribers represents the number of unique customers with at least one active paid subscription at the end of a month.

RunSmart uses the effective subscription period to determine whether a subscriber is active.

This means annual and other longer-term subscriptions remain active during the months covered by the subscription, even when no invoice is issued during those months.

A new subscriber is a customer whose first paid subscription becomes active during the month. If a customer previously churned and later returns, RunSmart treats that customer as reactivated rather than as a new subscriber.

Trials are not counted as paid subscribers while they are still in the trial period. Once a trial converts to a paid subscription, the customer begins contributing to subscriber counts and recurring revenue metrics.

A cancellation is counted when the customer's subscription actually ends, rather than when the customer initially requests the cancellation.

For example, if a customer cancels on June 15 but remains subscribed until June 30, the cancellation is reflected when the subscription becomes inactive.

If a customer has multiple subscriptions, the customer is not considered fully churned until their last active subscription ends.

RunSmart calculates subscriber churn as:

Churn Rate = Customers Canceled During the Month ÷ Active Subscribers at the End of the Prior Month

This helps prevent product changes, upgrades, or individual subscription cancellations from automatically being treated as complete customer churn.

Subscriptions that are past_due continue to be treated as active while payment collection is still in progress. If a subscription becomes unpaid, RunSmart removes it from active subscriber and MRR calculations and treats the customer as churned if they have no other active subscriptions. A subscription with a true paused status is also excluded while paused. Simply pausing payment collection without pausing the subscription itself does not automatically remove the customer from active subscriber counts.

RunSmart tracks subscribers and units separately.

A subscriber represents a customer.

Units represent subscription quantities, such as licenses, seats, locations, or another quantity associated with a subscription.

For example, a company with one subscription containing 20 user seats represents:

For monthly reporting, units represent the subscription quantity in effect at the end of the month rather than the sum of quantities appearing on invoices. This prevents prorations and other billing adjustments from artificially increasing unit counts.

Tracking these separately helps RunSmart identify growth that comes from gaining new customers versus expansion within existing customers.

Subscription revenue is based primarily on Stripe invoice line items associated with recurring subscription activity.

RunSmart accounts for items such as:

Taxes are excluded from subscription revenue.

Non-recurring charges that can clearly be identified as one-time charges are also excluded from recurring subscription analysis.

Credits and refunds reduce revenue rather than affecting subscriber counts.

Stripe is primarily a billing platform, while RunSmart uses your Stripe activity as part of a broader financial forecast.

Because of this, the timing of subscription revenue in RunSmart may differ from what you see in certain Stripe reports or dashboards.

RunSmart automatically follows the cash or accrual accounting method configured in your QuickBooks Online account so your subscription revenue is treated consistently with the rest of your financial forecast.

RunSmart recognizes subscription revenue when payment is received and includes paid invoices in the applicable period.

RunSmart recognizes subscription revenue when the invoice is issued, regardless of whether it has been paid yet.

This alignment is important because the timing of an invoice or payment does not always match how your company recognizes revenue for financial reporting purposes.

By using the accounting method already configured in QuickBooks, RunSmart helps ensure your Stripe subscription revenue flows consistently into your broader financial statements and projections for profitability, cash flow, runway, and other financial metrics.

Because of this, you do not have to manually reinterpret Stripe billing activity before using it in your financial forecast.

RunSmart uses your project's Reporting Time Zone to determine which month Stripe activity belongs to. This is especially important for transactions that occur near midnight at the end of a month, when different time zones could otherwise cause the same activity to appear in different months.

RunSmart sets the reporting time zone automatically based on your company location, but you can change it in your project settings if your business uses a different time zone for financial reporting. The Reporting Time Zone setting only appears after Stripe has been connected to the project. This helps keep your Stripe subscription revenue aligned with the monthly reporting periods used throughout RunSmart.

If your Stripe account includes transactions in multiple currencies, RunSmart converts those amounts into the home currency configured in your QuickBooks Online account.

This allows subscription revenue, MRR, and other Stripe-based metrics to be analyzed consistently alongside the rest of your company's financial data and forecasts, rather than mixing values reported in different currencies.

The date used for the exchange rate depends on your accounting method:

This helps keep multi-currency Stripe activity aligned with the accounting basis used throughout your RunSmart financial statements and forecasts.

Monthly Recurring Revenue, or MRR, measures the normalized monthly value of your active subscriptions.

Unlike recognized revenue, MRR is based on subscription pricing and quantity rather than when an invoice happens to be issued or paid.

For example:

This allows monthly and annual plans to be compared consistently.

One-time charges, taxes, and other non-recurring items are excluded from MRR.

RunSmart breaks changes in MRR into several components.

New MRR is recurring revenue added from new subscribers.

Expansion MRR is additional recurring revenue from existing subscribers, such as a customer adding seats or upgrading to a more expensive plan.

Contraction MRR is recurring revenue lost when an existing customer reduces seats or moves to a lower-priced plan.

Churned MRR is recurring revenue lost when a customer fully cancels their subscription relationship.

If an existing customer moves from one subscription product to another, RunSmart treats it as a product change rather than churn followed by a new subscription. If the move increases MRR, only the increase is classified as Expansion MRR. If it decreases MRR, only the decrease is classified as Contraction MRR.

For multi-currency subscriptions, RunSmart converts MRR into the company’s QuickBooks home currency using the applicable exchange rate. Because exchange rates can change over time, the home-currency value of MRR may vary from one month to the next even when the customer’s subscription, price, and quantity have not changed.

Together, these components help explain not just whether MRR changed, but why it changed.

Annual subscriptions are treated differently depending on the metric being analyzed.

For MRR, the annual subscription value is normalized into a monthly amount.

For subscriber counts, the subscriber remains active during the entire subscription period.

For recognized revenue, RunSmart follows the accounting method configured in QuickBooks.

This allows RunSmart to separate billing timing from recurring subscription value.

Discounts reduce both applicable subscription revenue and recurring value.

Voided invoices are excluded from accrual-basis subscription revenue, including the original month in which the invoice was recorded.

Credits and refunds reduce subscription revenue. Refunds are reflected in the month they occur, and RunSmart avoids counting the same adjustment twice when a refund and related credit are associated with the same activity.

Prorated charges are included when calculating revenue because they represent actual billing activity.

When modeling changes to subscription quantities for quarterly, annual, or other multi-month plans, RunSmart prorates the expected billing impact based on the remaining portion of the subscription term rather than assuming that an entire new term is billed immediately.

However, prorations do not artificially increase or decrease subscriber counts or recurring subscription value simply because a billing adjustment occurred.

RunSmart provides several ways to analyze your Stripe data.

View historical and forecasted subscription revenue by SKU or product, along with total subscription revenue.

See changes in subscriber activity, including:

You can filter the view by SKU when you want to focus on a particular subscription product.

See how your recurring revenue changes over time using:

Together, these views allow you to move from simply seeing whether subscription revenue increased or decreased to understanding the drivers behind the change.

It depends.

If an archived product no longer has any active subscribers, RunSmart retains its historical information but does not generate a future forecast for it.

If an archived product still has active subscribers, RunSmart continues to forecast the revenue and subscription activity associated with those existing subscribers, but assumes no new subscribers will be added to the archived product.

Similarly, if a price has been archived but is still being used by existing subscribers, RunSmart continues to account for those subscriptions but does not forecast new sales using that archived price.

Yes.

You can add a future subscription product even when the product has no historical sales history.

For a new product, you provide information such as:

RunSmart can then model future subscriber growth and subscription activity beginning from zero existing subscribers.

This can be useful when planning a new pricing tier, product launch, or subscription offering.

Yes.

The Forecast Modifier Table allows you to model changes to subscription assumptions over specific future periods.

For example, you can explore the impact of:

As you make these adjustments, RunSmart updates the subscription forecast so you can preview the what-if effect before applying those changes to the rest of your financial forecast.

No, not automatically.

You can first model subscription changes and review their effect within the subscription forecast.

When you're ready, you can choose Transfer Modifications to apply those revenue changes to the broader RunSmart financial forecast.

Because sales and revenue influence many other financial calculations, RunSmart recalculates the related forecasts, correlations, KPIs, financial statements, and downstream projections for you.

Stripe forecast modifications are applied to the Custom Forecast Model for the scenario you are working with.

They do not overwrite the system-generated Main Analysis baseline.

If a Custom Forecast Model does not already exist, RunSmart creates one automatically when you transfer your modifications.

This allows you to experiment with subscription assumptions without changing RunSmart's original system-generated forecast.

Transferring Stripe subscription modifications replaces existing revenue-related changes within that Custom Forecast Model.

RunSmart warns you before the transfer occurs so you can decide whether you want to proceed.

After the transfer, related financial forecasts and downstream projections are recalculated using the new subscription revenue assumptions.

Stripe provides detailed information about your customers, subscriptions, products, billing, and recurring revenue.

QuickBooks provides the broader financial picture of your business, including revenue, expenses, profitability, cash flow, assets, liabilities, and other financial activity.

Many subscription analytics tools focus primarily on what is happening inside your subscription business. RunSmart combines Stripe and QuickBooks so subscription activity can also be evaluated in the context of your overall financial performance and forecast.

For example, you can explore questions such as:

This distinction is especially important when modeling the future. A change in subscriber growth, pricing, churn, or expansion does not affect subscription metrics alone. It can also change revenue and, in turn, affect other areas of the company's financial forecast.

RunSmart connects those subscription-level drivers with your broader financial model so you can understand not only what may happen to your subscription metrics, but what those changes could mean for the business as a whole.