If you run a community on Circle and take payments through a paywall, every sale gets charged twice before the money reaches your bank: once by Stripe for processing the card, and once by Circle for facilitating the transaction. Reconciling that properly in FreeAgent means accounting for both, not just whatever number lands in your account.
That second charge is easy to miss if you're not looking for it.
What Circle actually charges
Circle takes a transaction fee on top of Stripe's own processing fee, and the rate depends on your plan:
- Professional plan: 2%
- Business plan: 1%
- Circle Plus plan: 0.5%
That's stacked on top of Stripe's standard processing fee (1.5% + 20p, typically, for UK cards). So a £100 paywall purchase on the Professional plan works out roughly as:
- Customer pays: £100.00
- Stripe's fee: ~£1.70
- Circle's fee: £2.00
- You receive: ~£96.30
Two separate companies are taking a cut of every sale, and your bank statement just shows one net deposit.
What shows up in your Stripe balance transactions
For each paywall payment, Stripe's balance transactions include:
- A charge: the full amount the member paid
- Stripe's fee: the processing fee
- An application fee: Circle's transaction fee, deducted separately
- A payout: whatever's left once both fees have come out
The "application fee" line is Stripe's own name for what Circle is charging you. It's not a Stripe fee, it's Circle's, and it's worth tracking as its own cost, not lumped in with payment processing.
Why this is worth getting right
Your true revenue is the £100, not the £96.30. If you only record the payout amount as income, your sales figures understate what your community actually generated, and understate what you're actually paying to run it on Circle.
Circle's fee scales with your plan, which makes it worth tracking on its own. Since the rate drops as you move up plans (2% → 1% → 0.5%), knowing exactly how much you're paying in Circle fees each month is the actual number you'd weigh against a plan upgrade, not a vague sense that "fees feel high."
It's a different kind of cost than Stripe's fee. Stripe's fee is the cost of accepting card payments. Circle's fee is the cost of running your paywall on their platform. Both are real business expenses, but they answer different questions, so they're worth keeping separate on your P&L.
How FreeAgent's native Stripe integration handles this
It doesn't distinguish it at all. FreeAgent's built-in Stripe feed imports balance transactions generically, with no concept of an application fee versus a processing fee. Circle's transaction fee shows up as just another unexplained transaction for you to categorise by hand, and it's easy to end up guessing rather than recording it consistently.
How ClearingHouse handles it
ClearingHouse recognises Stripe Connect application fees, the mechanism Circle's fee is built on, as their own transaction type, not a generic unexplained entry. Each one is recorded automatically as an expense in your clearing account, labelled "Stripe Connect application fee", alongside Stripe's own processing fees and payouts.
Both fees currently land in the same FreeAgent expense category (Bank & Finance Charges), so your P&L won't split them into two separate lines. But every individual transaction is recorded and clearly described, so you can always see exactly what Stripe took and what Circle took, rather than reconstructing it from a Stripe balance export every month.
Getting started
If you're running paywalls on Circle, it's worth checking your Stripe balance transactions for application_fee entries alongside your regular charges. That fee is a real, plan-dependent cost of running your community, and it deserves to be visible on your books, not folded invisibly into your Stripe processing costs.
If you're using FreeAgent and want this recorded automatically, ClearingHouse takes a few minutes to set up.
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