Why This Happens to Every Scaling Company
At seed stage, you can reconcile Stripe and Salesforce manually. One person closes the deal, another checks the payment came through, and you move on. It works because volume is low and context is high.
By Series A, the cracks are everywhere:
- Multiple Stripe subscriptions under one Salesforce account
- Upsells closed in Stripe but never updated in Salesforce
- Free trials converting to paid before the deal officially closes
- Refunds processed in Stripe with no corresponding update in Salesforce
- Billing entity names that don't match account names
The fundamental issue: nothing maps a Stripe customer_id to a Salesforce Account ID. Without that explicit link, every downstream report is a guess.
The Five Root Causes
- No shared identifier — Stripe and Salesforce each generate their own IDs. Unless someone explicitly stores one in the other, there's no automatic connection.
- Timing mismatches — Stripe records revenue on payment success. Salesforce records it on opportunity close. These can be days or weeks apart.
- Object model differences — Salesforce has Accounts, Opportunities, and Products. Stripe has Customers, Subscriptions, and Invoices. The structures don't map one-to-one.
- Manual entry errors — Someone types the wrong amount, forgets to update a field, or closes the wrong opportunity. At scale, this is inevitable.
- No reconciliation layer — Data flows into both systems, but nothing sits between them to compare, flag conflicts, or resolve discrepancies.
What This Actually Costs You
Your data team spends roughly 60% of their time on ad hoc requests. At a fully loaded cost of ~$220K/year per data engineer, you're paying six figures annually for people to answer "can you check this number?"
The board deck comes from Salesforce. The CFO's model comes from Stripe. RevOps pulls from the warehouse. None of them match. Every month, someone spends days reconciling manually, and the result is still an approximation.
The Common Fixes (And Why They Fall Short)
- Sync tools (Fivetran, Airbyte, Census) — They move data between systems, but they don't reconcile it. You end up with conflicting records sitting side by side in your warehouse.
- BI dashboards (Looker, Hex) — They visualize the discrepancy beautifully, but they can't resolve it. You see the problem; you still can't fix it.
- Manual reconciliation — Works until you have about 50 customers. After that, the effort scales linearly while accuracy drops.
- Custom scripts — An engineer writes a Python script to compare records. It works until edge cases multiply. It's brittle, undocumented, and breaks when that engineer leaves.
What Actually Works
You need three things:
- A mapping layer that understands relationships — Not just syncing fields, but knowing that this Stripe subscription belongs to that Salesforce account, even when the names don't match.
- Conflict detection and resolution — When Stripe says $10K and Salesforce says $12K, the system should flag it, explain why, and suggest which is correct.
- Continuous reconciliation — Not a monthly fire drill, but an ongoing process that catches discrepancies as they appear.
How to Audit Your Current State
Start simple:
- Export your top 20 customers from Salesforce with their ARR values.
- Pull the same customers from Stripe with their MRR × 12.
- Compare them side by side.
If more than 10% have discrepancies greater than 5%, you have a reconciliation problem. If you can't even match the accounts between systems, you have an identity resolution problem.
The Bottom Line
Stripe and Salesforce serve different purposes. They will never agree out of the box. The question isn't whether they match — it's whether you have the infrastructure to connect them, spot conflicts, and give your team one version of the truth.
Eru connects your revenue systems, maps the relationships, and surfaces conflicts before they hit your board deck.
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