If you sell more than one thing through Stripe, your P&L should show you how much revenue each product generates. But by default, most Stripe-to-FreeAgent setups lump everything into a single income line. That makes it impossible to tell which products are driving your business and which are underperforming.
Here's why per-product categorisation matters, how people typically try to solve it, and how ClearingHouse makes it automatic.
Why a single "Stripe income" line isn't enough
Imagine you sell a monthly SaaS subscription, a one-off setup fee, and occasional consulting hours, all through Stripe. Without per-product categorisation, your P&L shows one big "Sales" number. You can see total revenue, but you can't answer basic questions like:
- How much recurring revenue came from subscriptions this quarter?
- Are setup fees covering the cost of onboarding?
- Is consulting revenue growing or shrinking?
These aren't edge cases. They're the kind of questions you should be able to answer as a business owner, and the kind of decisions you should be making month to month.
How FreeAgent accounting categories work
FreeAgent uses accounting categories to classify income and expenses. Every transaction needs to be assigned to a category, and these categories are what drive your P&L and other reports.
The default income category is "Income - Sales". If all your Stripe revenue lands here, your reports show a single line for all sales income. FreeAgent supports multiple income categories, so you could have separate ones for subscriptions, setup fees, and consulting, but you need a way to assign each transaction to the right one.
The manual approach
Without automation, categorising Stripe revenue by product means:
- Looking at each Stripe payment to identify which product it relates to
- Finding or creating the matching transaction in FreeAgent
- Changing the accounting category from the default to the correct one
- Repeating this for every single transaction
This is tedious at low volumes and unsustainable at higher ones. Most people give up and leave everything under the default category, which defeats the purpose.
Some people try to work around this by creating separate FreeAgent invoices for each product type, but that only works if you're invoicing manually through FreeAgent. If your payments come through Stripe subscriptions or Checkout, FreeAgent never sees the product breakdown.
How ClearingHouse handles per-product categorisation
ClearingHouse lets you map each Stripe product (or price) to a specific FreeAgent accounting category. You set this up once during onboarding, and every transaction synced from that point on is automatically assigned to the right category.
For example, you could map:
- "Pro Plan" → Income - Subscriptions
- "Setup Fee" → Income - Setup
- "Consulting" → Income - Consulting
When a customer pays for a Pro Plan subscription, ClearingHouse creates the invoice and explains the payment in FreeAgent using the "Subscriptions" category. A setup fee goes to "Setup". Consulting goes to "Consulting". No manual intervention needed.
If you add a new product to Stripe later, ClearingHouse will use your default accounting category until you assign a specific one. You can update the mappings at any time from your connection settings.
What this looks like in practice
Once your categories are mapped, your FreeAgent P&L breaks down revenue by product type instead of showing a single line. You can see at a glance:
- Which products are generating the most revenue
- How revenue mix is changing over time
- Whether a new product line is pulling its weight
Your accountant gets cleaner data. Your tax return is more accurate. And you can make decisions based on real numbers instead of guesses.
Getting started
If you're already using ClearingHouse, you can configure your category mappings from your connection settings. Changes will apply to all future transactions.
If you're not using ClearingHouse yet, it takes a few minutes to set up. Connect your Stripe and FreeAgent accounts, map your products to categories, and your revenue will be properly categorised from that point forward.
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