Your Stripe account via vcita: what it actually means for your FreeAgent bookkeeping

If you take payments through vcita, you connected a Stripe account as part of setting up online payments. A reasonable question follows: is that really your Stripe account, or does vcita sit in the middle of it somehow, the way some other booking and community platforms do?

The short answer is that it's genuinely yours, and it's simpler than you might expect.

vcita doesn't take a cut of your payments

Unlike some vertical software that charges its own fee on top of Stripe's processing fee, vcita's own help centre is explicit that vcita charges no commission or transaction fee on the payments you take. You pay for vcita through your subscription, not through a percentage of every sale.

That means there's no hidden "application fee" to hunt for in your Stripe balance transactions, no second company taking a cut of each payment, and no extra reconciliation step beyond what you'd do with any standalone Stripe account.

What this means practically

Your vcita-connected Stripe account behaves like a normal Stripe account:

• A charge: the full amount the customer paid
• Stripe's fee: Stripe's own processing fee, and nothing else deducted alongside it
• A payout: your sales minus Stripe's fee, no additional platform cut

If you've read anything about Stripe Connect "application fees" or seen guidance about platforms taking a cut, none of that applies here. Reconciling vcita-sourced Stripe payments is exactly the same problem as reconciling any Stripe payments: matching payouts back to charges, recording fees as an expense, and handling refunds correctly.

The one thing still worth checking

vcita's own subscription cost is billed to you separately, outside of Stripe, so it won't show up anywhere in your Stripe balance transactions at all. Make sure it's recorded as its own software expense in FreeAgent rather than assumed to be baked into your payment processing costs somewhere. It's a genuine cost of running your business, just one that doesn't touch your Stripe reconciliation.

Handling the reconciliation itself

Since there's no vcita-specific complexity here, the standard guidance applies:

• Reconciling Stripe payouts in FreeAgent covers matching a payout back to the charges, fees, and refunds that make it up.
• A bookkeeper's guide to Stripe clearing accounts covers the underlying approach that makes ongoing reconciliation manageable rather than a monthly scramble.
• Handling Stripe refunds in FreeAgent covers what to do when you refund a client.

Getting started

If you're using FreeAgent and want your vcita-sourced Stripe transactions reconciled automatically, rather than explained one by one, ClearingHouse takes a few minutes to set up. It works the same for a vcita-connected Stripe account as it does for any other, since there's no platform-specific fee logic to account for.