Once you're connected you have two places to look at money: Studio and your own Stripe Dashboard at dashboard.stripe.com. They're not duplicates. Each owns a different half of the job, and knowing which is which saves a lot of clicking.
The short version
Studio is where the work happens. Donation pages, tickets, invoices, donors, receipts, refunds, reports on who gave what.
Stripe is where the banking happens. Payouts, bank accounts, disputes, tax forms, and the raw ledger of every charge.
Do these in Studio
- Create and publish donation pages, event ticketing, and invoices.
- Issue refunds — see Issuing Refunds. Refunding here keeps your donor records straight; refunding in Stripe leaves Studio's records stale.
- Manage recurring gifts and subscriptions.
- Send receipts and year-end giving statements.
- See who gave, how often, and to what.
Do these in Stripe
- Change your payout schedule or bank account — Settings → Payouts. Daily, weekly, or monthly instead of the rolling default.
- See your balance and upcoming payouts — Balance. This is where you reconcile a bank deposit back to the individual gifts inside it.
- Respond to disputes — Disputes. These have hard deadlines and can only be answered on Stripe.
- Download tax forms — the Documents section. See Stripe Tax Forms.
- Update your public business details and statement descriptor — Settings → Public details.
- Invite your bookkeeper — team members with scoped permissions, so you never share a login.
- Export the raw ledger for accounting — every charge, fee, refund, and payout as CSV.
Why totals sometimes differ
Studio reports what people gave. Stripe reports what landed in your balance after fees. A $100 gift is $100 in Studio and about $96.80 in Stripe. Both are right; they're answering different questions. The breakdown is in Understanding Processing Fees.
Timing also differs. Studio marks a card payment complete immediately. Bank transfers sit pending for several business days before Stripe confirms them, so a payment can be visible in Studio and not yet in your Stripe balance.
One rule worth following
Refund in Studio, not in Stripe. A refund issued directly in the Stripe Dashboard moves the money but doesn't tell Studio, so the donor's record, their receipt history, and your reports all keep showing a gift they no longer made. Studio-side refunds handle both.
Logging in
Use the email and password you set during signup at dashboard.stripe.com. If you already had a Stripe account under the same email, the workspace's account appears in the account switcher at the top left. Lost the login? Use Stripe's password reset — Studio can't recover it, because Studio never had it.