Stripe

What you actually need

You’re a subscription SaaS with per-household pricing. That means:

Monthly recurring billing
Variable quantities (advisor adds/removes households)
Different pricing tiers (advisor vs. enterprise)
Trial periods
Proration when clients upgrade or downgrade
Automated receipts and failed payment retry
Tax calculation (HST/GST by province)

That’s a subscription billing platform, not a payment processor.

The recommendation: Stripe + Stripe Billing

What	Why
Stripe as payment processor	Industry standard for SaaS. Canadian company support. Handles credit cards, bank debits (pre-authorized debit / PAD in Canada). PCI compliant — you never touch card numbers.
Stripe Billing for subscriptions	Built specifically for recurring SaaS billing. Handles proration, trials, quantity changes, dunning (failed payment retries), invoicing, tax calculation.
Stripe Customer Portal	Hosted page where your clients update their payment method, view invoices, cancel — you don’t have to build any of this.

What it costs

Fee	Amount
Card transactions	2.9% + $0.30 CAD per transaction
Stripe Billing	0.5% of recurring revenue (on top of transaction fees)
Monthly minimum	None
Setup	Free

For a $50/ m o n t hh o u se h o l d s u b scr i pt i o n, yo u^{'} re p a y in g ro ug h l y * *$ 1.95 per transaction** (~3.9%). At your stage that’s completely reasonable. As you scale to enterprise deals with larger invoices, the percentage impact drops significantly.

How it connects to QuickBooks

This is the key: Stripe handles billing, QuickBooks handles accounting. They’re different jobs.

Use one of these to sync automatically:

Stripe’s native QuickBooks Online integration — pushes invoices, payments, and payouts into QBO automatically
Airtable / Make / Zapier — if you need custom mapping between Stripe line items and your QBO chart of accounts

The flow becomes:

Client signs up → Stripe charges their card monthly
                → Stripe sends receipt to client
                → Stripe syncs invoice + payment to QuickBooks
                → QuickBooks handles your books, HST remittance, reporting

You never manually invoice anyone. QuickBooks stays clean without double entry.

Where payment lives in your product

Two options depending on your architecture:

Option A: Stripe Checkout (simplest)

Client clicks “Subscribe” on your website or in FileMaker
Redirected to a Stripe-hosted checkout page (branded with your logo/colours)
Payment collected, subscription created
Client redirected back to Focura
No PCI scope on your side at all

Option B: Embedded payment form

Stripe Elements embedded in your WordPress site or a dedicated billing page
Client stays on your site throughout
More polished, but requires a bit more development
Still PCI-compliant because Stripe.js handles card data — it never touches your server

At your stage, Option A. You can move to B later when polish matters more than speed.

What about enterprise / firm billing?

For larger deals (firm-wide licensing, white-label), you’ll likely negotiate custom pricing and send proper invoices. For those:

Create the invoice in Stripe Invoicing (or QuickBooks — either works)
Client pays via bank transfer, cheque, or card
These are low-volume, high-value — manual handling is fine

Don’t over-engineer enterprise billing before you have enterprise clients.

Next steps

Create a Stripe account at stripe.com — takes 10 minutes, Canadian business, instant setup
Define your initial pricing tiers in Stripe Billing (e.g., “Advisor — per household — $X/month”)
Connect Stripe to QuickBooks Online using the native integration
Generate a Stripe Checkout link for your first trial clients — you can literally email them a payment link to start

You can have the entire billing infrastructure live in an afternoon. Everything else — embedded forms, customer portal, usage-based pricing — is refinement you do as you scale.

Focura — Team

Explorer