No State in Your Stripe Sales Report? Here's the Fix

September 5, 2023

Getting the Right Sales Tax Info from Stripe

As a startup founder, you need to know your sales broken down by state for sales tax reasons. But you find the downloads from Stripe don't always include the state for each sale. Is this something you can fix yourself?

Short Answer:

Stripe can only show state information if you collect it from customers first. So you need to update your Stripe settings (and perhaps your own website backend) to require state info at checkout. Then Stripe can provide state-by-state sales reports.

Full Explanation:

Many startups use Stripe to process payments. Stripe lets you download reports showing all your sales.

But some sales in the Stripe report only show the total amount. They don't list the state where the customer lives.

This matters for sales tax. Some states require you to collect sales tax from customers living there.

To do this, you need sales reports from Stripe that break down sales by state.

If state info is missing, it's because you didn't require customers to enter their state at checkout.

So Stripe has no way to know what state each sale came from.

The fix is for you to update your Stripe account settings. You need to require state info from every customer during checkout.

Once you do that, Stripe can provide sales reports broken down by state. Then you can properly collect and pay sales taxes.