How You Get Paid

When a customer buys from you through Business Dash — a store product, a job invoice, a subscription, a booking deposit, or a point-of-sale charge — the money settles into your own Stripe account and pays out to your bank. Business Dash never holds your funds. This page explains exactly how that works and what you have to do (which is almost nothing).

The two Stripe accounts

There are two separate money relationships on the platform, and they use two separate Stripe accounts. Keeping them straight is the whole model:

1. The platform account (Business Dash → you). This is our Stripe account. It only ever handles your subscription to Business Dash — the fee you pay us to use the platform. You never touch it.

2. Your connected account (you → your customers). This is your own Stripe account, linked to Business Dash through Stripe Connect. Every dollar your customers pay you flows through here and settles to you.

This layer answers: "Whose money is this?" Your customers' payments are always your money, in your account — not ours.

Connecting your account (one time)

Before you can accept a single payment, you connect your Stripe account. In the dashboard, go to CRM → Settings → Payments and start the Stripe onboarding.

• If you already have a Stripe account, you sign in and authorize the connection.
• If you don't, Stripe walks you through creating one — business details, bank account for payouts, and identity verification (a legal requirement Stripe handles, not us).

This uses Stripe Connect Express, so Stripe hosts the onboarding and owns the sensitive parts (your bank details, tax info, identity documents). Business Dash only ever sees that your account is connected and ready — never your banking credentials.

How a payment actually flows

Business Dash uses Stripe's direct charges. When a customer checks out:

1. The charge is created on your connected account, so the funds are yours from the moment they're captured — they never pass through a Business Dash balance.
2. Business Dash automatically deducts a small platform fee (an application_fee) from that charge. This is our cut for running the platform, and it's taken at the moment of payment — there's no separate invoice for it.
3. The remainder is your revenue. It accumulates in your Stripe balance.
4. Stripe pays out your balance to your bank on your payout schedule (Stripe defaults to a rolling daily or every-few-days schedule; you can change it in your Stripe dashboard).

Because the money is in your Stripe account, refunds, disputes, payout timing, and tax reporting all live in your Stripe dashboard — exactly as if you'd built the Stripe integration yourself.

What Business Dash handles for you

The point of selling through Business Dash is that you never write payment code or reconcile anything by hand. Everything below is automatic:

• Customer records. Before any checkout, we create a durable Stripe customer for the buyer on your account and remember the link, so repeat purchases, subscriptions, and saved payment methods all attach to the same customer.
• Checkout. We mint Stripe's hosted checkout for the buyer; you just send them to it (the SDK does this for you on your storefront).
• Getting the result right. When a payment succeeds, Stripe notifies us, and we re-read the current state directly from Stripe as the source of truth before recording the order, invoice, or subscription — so a dropped or duplicated notification can never leave your records wrong.
• Retries and edge cases. Failed cards, refunds, chargebacks, subscription renewals, and cancellations are all reflected back into your dashboard automatically.

This is the same philosophy as the rest of the platform: you supply the design and the products; the infrastructure is invisible. See the Core System Model for how the Platform, Organization, and Customer layers fit together.

What you sell, all through the same account

Once connected, your one Stripe account is the destination for every kind of payment Business Dash supports:

• Store — one-time digital and physical products
• Invoices — job and project billing (including partial and manual payments)
• Subscriptions — recurring plans your customers subscribe to
• Scheduling — booking deposits and paid appointments
• Point of Sale — in-person charges

You don't configure payments separately for each. Connect once, and they all settle to the same place.

Quick reference