Connect Stripe and get paid

Rentalbuddy never holds your money. Card payments go straight into your own Stripe account, and Stripe pays out to your bank. That is why connecting Stripe is a required setup step: until it is done, customers cannot pay by card, and the tax settings screen stays locked too.

This guide walks through the whole journey — starting the connection, getting through Stripe's questions, confirming it worked, and setting up VAT — including the snags that stop real operators.

Before you start

Two decisions are easier to make now than later:

Currency. Set it under Settings → Payments before you take bookings. As the screen itself says: "You can change currency only while this account has no active or future bookings on any location. If the selection is locked, bookings already exist."
New or existing Stripe account? If you already use Stripe for another website or tool, you can link that account — but note the warning shown in the connect dialog: "Stripe only allows your account to be linked to one business platform at a time. If your Stripe account is still connected to another service, disconnect it there first or use a different Stripe account."

If you take all payments on site and do not want online payment at all, you do not need Stripe — switch on Disable Stripe Payments under Settings → Payments instead. See Rentalbuddy or Stripe — where do I go for what? for what that switch does.

1. Start the connection

You can start from either of two places — they open the same flow:

The Home page. The Guide has a step called Configure payments ("Required to take payments online."). Click it. If it says "You need to create a location before you can configure payments", create your location first.
Settings. Open Settings in the left menu, then the Payments tab. Under Online payments you will see your status — Connected or Not connected — and the button Connect with Stripe to start handling payments. The same button is on the Integrations tab, and the tax settings tab links here too.

A dialog titled Connect with Stripe opens with two choices:

I am new to Stripe → Set up a new account. Rentalbuddy creates a fresh Stripe account for you and sends you to Stripe's sign-up form. As the dialog puts it: "You will complete a short sign-up on Stripe's website. Best if you do not already use Stripe elsewhere."
I already use Stripe → Connect my existing account. You log in at Stripe and approve the link to Rentalbuddy.

Either way the button changes to Opening Stripe… and Stripe opens in a new tab.

2. What Stripe asks for

The form you now fill in belongs to Stripe, not Rentalbuddy — Stripe is legally required to verify who it pays money to. Expect questions about:

Your business — type of organisation, registration details, address, website.
You — the person representing the business, sometimes including photo ID for identity verification.
Your bank account — where Stripe should send your payouts.

Rentalbuddy asks Stripe to collect everything it will eventually need in one pass, so the form is thorough. That is deliberate: it saves you from Stripe pausing your payouts weeks later to ask for a missing document mid-season.

"We are an association and have no VAT registration number"

Non-profits and associations regularly get stuck on Stripe's VAT registration step. To be clear about who requires what:

Rentalbuddy never asks for a VAT number. There is no VAT-number field anywhere in the connection flow on Rentalbuddy's side, and no Rentalbuddy setting can remove a step from Stripe's form.
The VAT question is Stripe's. What Stripe asks depends on your country and on the type of organisation you select at the start of its form — so make sure you pick the type that actually matches your organisation rather than defaulting to "company".

If Stripe's form still demands a VAT number your organisation does not have, that has to be resolved with Stripe's support, not ours — and do not enter a made-up or placeholder number to get past the step. We cannot promise Stripe will approve an organisation without VAT registration; that decision is theirs.

Being VAT-exempt is no problem inside Rentalbuddy: the generated default taxes include a 0% rate you can put on your products (see step 4).

3. Coming back to Rentalbuddy

When you finish Stripe's form — or leave it — Stripe sends you back to a status page in the Rentalbuddy admin.

If it worked you will see Stripe successfully connected! — "You have successfully connected your Stripe account. You can now start accepting payments through Rentalbuddy." Any tax rates you have already created in Rentalbuddy are synced to your new Stripe account automatically at this point. If you linked an existing account, the banner reads "Your existing Stripe account was linked."

If you did not finish, the page says Stripe is not connected, with a message such as: "You have started the onboarding process with Stripe but not completed it. Please click the button below to resume connecting your Stripe account." Click Connect with Stripe to start handling payments — it resumes where you left off, it does not start over.

If the Stripe link had expired — or a messaging app opened it first to show a link preview, which counts as using the single-use link — you get a page explaining exactly that. Click the button to get a fresh link.

How to tell the connection is really complete

Settings → Payments → Online payments shows a green Connected.
On the Home page, the Configure payments step in the Guide is ticked.

One thing worth knowing: Rentalbuddy only reports Connected when Stripe confirms there is nothing outstanding at all on your account and card charges are enabled. So if you completed the form but still see Not connected, Stripe almost always wants one more thing. Log in to your Stripe dashboard, complete anything listed under your account's outstanding requirements, then reopen the Payments tab. The status is re-checked every time the page loads.

4. Set up your tax rates

Open Settings → the tax settings tab. This screen needs the Stripe connection first — without it, it says "You need to connect Stripe to create and manage taxes."

The fast way: generate the defaults

If you have no taxes yet, the screen shows No taxes yet — "You can generate default taxes for your country." Click Generate default taxes. This creates a standard set of VAT rates for your country — including a 0% rate — and confirms with "Taxes created! You can now use them on products." followed by "They have been synced to your Stripe account." If the button is disabled, set your company country first — the screen links you to Account settings.

Adding your own rate

Custom rates are added from the product form: next to the Taxes field there is an add button ("Add new tax"). The Add New Tax dialog asks for Country, Type, Percentage (%), Exclusive/Inclusive and an optional Description, then Add Tax → a Confirm Submission review → Confirm and Save. The new rate is selected on the product automatically and appears in tax settings like any other.

You can also create rates directly in Stripe — the tax settings screen says so itself: "To create more taxes, create them in the Stripe Dashboard and then sync from Stripe." Use the Sync from Stripe button to pull them in.

Inclusive or Exclusive — yes, both exist

Every rate is either Inclusive or Exclusive, shown in its own column in the tax table:

Inclusive — the price you set on the product already contains the tax. The customer pays exactly the listed price; the tax is broken out of it. All generated default rates are inclusive, which is the normal setup for consumer prices in Europe.
Exclusive — the tax is added on top of the product price at checkout. If you want to show prices excluding VAT, create an exclusive rate in the Add New Tax dialog and select it on your products.

One practical rule: keep only one active rate per percentage. At checkout, the product's rate is matched to the rate in your Stripe account by percentage alone — so an inclusive and an exclusive rate with the same percentage can be mixed up with each other.

Put the rate on your products

Rates do nothing until a product uses them. On each product, the Taxes field (required) lists your rates as "VAT (25%) inclusive" style entries — tick the one(s) that apply. Rates can be switched off with the Status toggle or removed with Delete in tax settings.

5. Where the money goes

Payments land in your Stripe account, and Stripe pays out to the bank account you gave during onboarding. How often you are paid out, what the card fees were, and anything about disputes all live in your Stripe dashboard — there are no such settings in Rentalbuddy. The full split of which system owns what is in Rentalbuddy or Stripe — where do I go for what?.

If the connection will not complete

Work down this list:

You left Stripe's form early. Go to Settings → Payments and click the connect button again — it resumes your onboarding, nothing is lost.
The Stripe page says the link is invalid or expired. Links are single-use. Go back to Settings → Payments and click the button for a fresh one — and don't share the link through a chat app, whose preview can use it up.
You finished the form but Rentalbuddy still shows "Not connected". Stripe is still waiting for something — often identity documents or bank verification. Log in at stripe.com and complete every outstanding requirement on your account, then reload the Payments tab.
"This Rentalbuddy account already has a Stripe connection." You cannot link a second Stripe account while one is connected. Switching to a different Stripe account is not something you can do yourself in the admin — contact support.
Linking an existing account failed. The banner explains the usual cause: "If you still use Stripe with another website or app, disconnect it there first, then try again." Stripe allows one platform per account — either free up that account or use a different one.
"No location selected." Create or select a location, then retry — the connection check runs per location.
Nothing needs pasting. There are no API keys, webhook addresses or signing secrets for you to enter anywhere — the connection is entirely handled by the button flow above. If an old guide or email tells you to copy Stripe API keys into Rentalbuddy, ignore it; that is not how the current system works.

Still stuck after all seven? Contact support and mention what the status page said — the exact message tells us where in the flow it stopped.