How do I connect my Stripe account?

1. Press Connect Stripe on your dashboard. It is the button on the Payments card, and it hands you straight to Stripe. The same button reads Finish setup if you have started once already.
2. Pick your country. Stripe sets the account and its payouts up for one country, and it cannot be changed later. Choose the country you actually bank in.
3. Finish Stripe's form. No registered company? Choose Individual when Stripe asks for your business type. Then photo ID and bank details, on Stripe's own pages. flatpass never sees or stores any of it.
4. Come back. You are connected once Stripe activates card payments on the account. Your dashboard's Payments card is what says so.

If you already have a Stripe account, the same flow connects it — there is nothing to create.

About ten minutes, and almost all of it is Stripe’s identity check rather than anything flatpass asks for. It is easier on a laptop than on a phone — photo ID and bank details are both things people have to go and find.

Approval has been quick so far: every seller who has connected to date had card payments switched on within half an hour of starting, and an existing Stripe account connects in a couple of minutes.

Stopping partway costs you nothing. The Stripe account is created before you ever reach their form, so coming back to your dashboard’s Connect Stripe button picks up from whatever Stripe already has rather than starting again.

Stripe’s first question is your business type. If you are selling as yourself, with no registered company, choose Individual. Stripe then asks only about you: your name, date of birth, address, email and phone, and the bank account your payouts go to.

Being asked for a company registration number, the company’s owners or directors, or a document proving the company exists means a company type was picked. Before you submit, Stripe’s review page has an edit button next to the business type. After you submit, ask Stripe support, from your Stripe dashboard, to change it.

Whether you need to register a business for your sales at all depends on the rules where you live.

flatpass uses Stripe Connect Standard. You authorise it from Stripe, and you can revoke that authorisation in your own Stripe dashboard whenever you want. No secret API key is ever pasted into flatpass — you authorise from Stripe, and you revoke from Stripe.

Charges are made directly on your account, which makes you the merchant of record: your customers, your money, your Stripe history. There is no flatpass balance in the middle and therefore no payout step from us — a payment is in your account when it settles, on Stripe’s own schedule.

You set each tier’s price once, in your settlement currency. Buyers are shown and charged in their own currency where Stripe supports it. To be paid in another currency, change it in Stripe before your first tier: How do I get paid in a different currency?

Stripe can ask for more details after you are live — a document that expired, a detail it could not verify. Your dashboard’s Payments card shows it, with the date to resolve it by, and it stays a warning rather than a block for as long as charges are still going through.

Stripe files those requests by deadline. Restricted soon is a future deadline: nothing is switched off, and you have until the date shown. Restricted means Stripe is disabling — or has disabled — part of the account, and that one wants doing now. Both are resolved in your Stripe dashboard, not in flatpass; we only read the status back.

If the only thing outstanding is a document Stripe is reviewing, the card says Stripe is reviewing a document instead of a date to resolve by. The account can stay restricted, with payouts paused, until the review finishes, and there is nothing to do in the meantime.