By role
Leakage, from your seat
Same truth, different scorecards. Dollars and control for CFOs; journals and close calendars for controllers; correctness and on-call for engineers; runway for founders. Each page translates the four leak vectors into the questions your role actually asks.
Finance leadership
The CFO’s guide to Stripe Connect leakage
Revenue leaks that never reach the P&L until they compound. The CFO-level view of Connect leakage — materiality, controls, audit trail, and the one question to ask engineering.
The controller’s month-end Stripe reconciliation, fixed
The unexplained balance delta at close usually has four causes. A controller’s tour of each, the journal entries they generate, and how to stop re-deriving them monthly.
Finance ops: the recovery queue nobody staffed
Recovery fails as heroics and succeeds as process. Triages, floors, SLAs tied to payout windows, templates — an operating model for a findings queue that clears.
Fractional CFOs: the audit you can run across every client in an afternoon
One read-only scan per client surfaces recoverable dollars you can bill to fix. The portfolio workflow for Connect leakage — baselines, remediation, ongoing monitor.
Accounting firms: a new advisory line hidden in client Stripe data
Clients on Connect platforms carry invisible receivables. A firm-level playbook for detecting, evidencing and recovering them — and writing the engagement letter.
Engineering
What unreversed transfers say about your codebase
The refund flag is set correctly — in the function everyone reviews. Four secondary paths never got the same treatment, plus the concurrency lessons baked into production detectors.
The payments engineer’s field guide to Connect reconciliation
You could build this. Here is the full technical scope — events, races, tolerances, idempotency — so you can price the build honestly before deciding.
Founders & scale
The bootstrapped founder’s $90 problem
On destination charges every refund costs the founder the full transfer — real runway gone silently. The founder-sized explanation and the ten-minute check.
Past $1M GMV, the leak stops being theoretical
Modelled leakage bands at seven-figure volume, where manual audits stop closing the loop, and the crossover economics of continuous detection.
At eight-figure GMV, reconciliation is infrastructure
Eight-figure platforms need detection embedded in operations: real-time pipeline, governed automation, controller exports, diligence readiness. The programme spec.
Multiple Stripe platform accounts, one recovery surface
Holdcos, regional entities, acquired platforms — several Stripe accounts means several places to lose money quietly. Multi-account architecture for detection and recovery.
Buying a marketplace? Audit the refund path before the deal closes
Targets rarely know their own leakage. A pre-close Connect audit quantifies silent liabilities, tests payments-code honesty, and prices the fix into the deal.