Novi Pay is powered by Stripe, one of the most trusted payment processors in the industry. While Stripe handles the technical transaction processing behind the scenes, Novi Pay gives you tools designed specifically for membership organizations, with built-in accounting automation for QuickBooks Online.
This article breaks down:
What Does "Powered by Stripe" Mean?
When you use Novi Pay, your transactions are securely processed by Stripe, maintaining PCI Compliance. While you could go directly to Stripe as a customer, the experience would be very different. Novi Pay offers:
Preferred pricing: We assume some of the transaction risk, which allows us to offer better rates than a direct Stripe account.
Deeper integration with QuickBooks Online: Novi Pay is built with over a decade of experience working with the QuickBooks API to automate accounting entries for credit card charges and payouts.
Streamlined reconciliation: Our system creates QuickBooks transactions that exactly match what happened in Stripe.
Terminology: Charges, Payments, and Payouts
Novi Pay uses Stripe's terminology to align closely with the underlying financial operations:
Term | Meaning |
Charge | Refers to a transaction initiated via Novi Pay. This could be tied to an invoice payment or a sales receipt. |
Payout | Money sent from Stripe to your bank account. We do not refer to this as a "payment" to avoid confusion. |
Top-up | A transfer of funds from your bank account to Stripe, used when you issue a refund without having enough available balance in your pending payouts or to cover incidental fees. |
How Payouts Work
Most of the time, you'll be collecting money through credit card and ACH charges, and Stripe will send that money to your bank account on a regular cadence. Novi Pay creates payments or sales receipts in QuickBooks Online and groups them into deposits based on Stripe’s payout schedule.
Novi Pay matches each Stripe payout with a deposit in QuickBooks:
1 payout = 1 QuickBooks deposit
Novi Pay creates associated payments or sales receipts and links them to the deposit
When a payout is processed, Novi Pay automatically records deposits in QuickBooks that reflect the batch of charges making up each payout. Read more about the life cycle of a payment.
By creating deposits in this way, Novi Pay is ensuring that the payout amount in Novi Pay matches the actual deposit from Stripe, for clean and accurate bookkeeping.
In Novi, these payouts will be reflected under Novi Pay > Balances.
Refunds & Top-Ups
Summary of the Refund Workflow
1 | Refund initiated |
2 | Novi waits 2 days* for new charges to amount to the refund due. As soon as your Available Balance can cover the refund, it's sent to customer. In most cases, the process ends here with your customer receiving their refund. |
3 | If at the end of the waiting period, your Available Balance can't cover the refund amount, a Top-Up is pulled from your bank. |
4 | Refund accounted for in next payout (reduces total deposit) |
How Refunds Are Handled
When you process a refund through Novi Pay, powered by Stripe, we will first attempt to use the funds from your Available Balance — meaning, from cleared payments that haven’t been paid out yet.
In most refund cases:
No top-up is needed
The refund is covered automatically by your Available Balance
You won’t notice any extra transactions in your bank account
This process helps reduce the number of top-ups and keeps your reconciliation clean and efficient.
However, if there aren’t enough funds available to cover the refund within two business days*, that’s when a Top-Up will be triggered (as explained below).
* Two days is the default Refund Delay Processing setting. You can update this setting to be between 1 and 5 days. For the ease of explanation, we'll continue to reference two days in this article.
When Top-Ups Come into Play
Occasionally, you may reach the end of your Refund Delay Processing time period and still not have enough of an Available Balance to cover a pending refund. In that case, here's what happens:
Wait period: Novi waits 2 business days (based on your Refund Delay Processing setting) to see if enough new charges come through to cover the refund.
Top-up initiated: If at the end of that time period, there aren’t enough funds in your Available Balance, Novi Pay will pull money from your bank account to cover the refund. This is called a Top-Up. This amount will include the refund amount plus an Account Debits Fee.
In QuickBooks, this will appear as a negative deposit from your bank into a Novi Pay Reserve Account for Top-Ups
Refund released: Once the top-up settles, Stripe releases the funds to your customer.
Next payout: In your next positive payout:
The refund is included, reducing the amount of money you receive Ex: If you're owed $500 in your payout but had a $100 refund, you'll receive $400.
[Rare Scenario] Top-up return: In a very rare case of perfect timing, a Top-Up can be pulled from your account while your Available Balance increases to meet the necessary amount to refund. In this case, the Top-Up will be returned to you in the following payout:
You receive the original top-up amount back, plus the fee charged Ex: $102.75 returned for a $100 top-up and a $2.75 fee.
A line item like "Fee for top-up – [date]" will appear in your deposit record under "funds added to deposit".
Why This Workflow?
While this multi-step refund process may be different than what you're used to, it mirrors how Stripe accounts for transactions. Our goal is to ensure your QuickBooks records match Stripe's activity exactly, making your audits cleaner and your reconciliation easier.
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