Stripe Connect setup walkthrough

Karven uses Stripe Connect to process card payments. Connect means the money goes directly into your bank account, not into a Karven holding account that we then pay out. This matters because the funds clear faster, the chargeback exposure is yours (which is the legally clean position), and the merchant statements are in your name.

What you'll need

• An ABN.
• A photo ID (driver's licence or passport) for the business owner.
• A business bank account.
• 5-10 minutes.

That's it. Stripe handles its own KYC; Karven just opens the right doors.

The setup flow

1. Settings → Payments → Connect Stripe.
2. Karven redirects you to Stripe's onboarding.
3. Stripe asks for your business type (sole trader, partnership, Pty Ltd), ABN, address, and director details.
4. Stripe verifies the ABN against the ABR in real time.
5. You upload a photo of your ID.
6. You add your bank account (BSB + account number).
7. Stripe verifies the bank account.
8. You're returned to Karven with a green "Connected" badge.

Stripe will run final checks in the background. For sole traders with clean ABNs, you're usually fully verified within a few minutes. For Pty Ltd companies with multiple directors, it can take a day or two while Stripe verifies the director documentation.

What you can do once connected

• Take deposits at acceptance. When a customer accepts a quote, the deposit card form appears in their portal. Funds settle to your account in 2-3 business days.
• Take final payment. Same flow at invoice time.
• Save customer cards. If the customer ticks "save card for the rest of this job", Karven (via Stripe's tokenisation) can take the final payment without re-asking for the card number.
• Refund. From any payment, hit Refund, full or partial. See refunding.
• Tap-to-pay. If you're on Business or Pro, your phone becomes a card reader for in-person payments. See Settings → Payments → Tap to Pay.

Fees

Standard Stripe fees apply: 1.7% + 30c for AU-issued cards, 3.5% + 30c for international cards. Karven doesn't add anything on top. The full Stripe rate card is in the connect dashboard you can reach from Karven.

How you handle these fees is up to you:

• Absorb them: they come out of your margin. Simple, clean, customer never sees them.
• Pass through (surcharge): the customer pays an extra X% to cover the card fee. Legal subject to the surcharge rules, which are being reformed federally from the date the ban takes effect (timing still being confirmed). See card-fee absorption for the full breakdown.
• Hybrid: absorb on small amounts, surcharge on large ones. Karven supports a threshold rule.

Payouts

Stripe pays out to your bank account on a rolling schedule. By default it's daily, with a 2-day rolling settlement window. So a card paid on Monday lands in your bank on Thursday morning.

You can change the schedule in the Stripe dashboard (weekly is also an option). Don't change it without thinking, daily payouts are the right answer for most cash-flow-conscious trades.

What happens to the money mid-flight

Between the customer's card being charged and the funds landing in your bank account, the money is held by Stripe, not by Karven. We can't touch it, we can't take fees from it, we don't even have visibility into the holding account beyond what Stripe shows you.

This is the right setup. If Karven ever folded, your customer payments would not be at risk. They'd flow as normal.

Chargebacks

If a customer disputes a charge through their bank, Karven shows you the dispute the moment Stripe notifies us. You have a defined window (usually 14 days) to respond with evidence. Karven helps you build the response, signed quote, completion photos, communication log, and submits it to Stripe.

Win rate on properly evidenced chargebacks is high. The best defence is the boring one: signed acceptances, dated photos, and good communication in writing. Karven's audit trail gives you all of these.

Disconnecting

You can disconnect Stripe at any time from Settings → Payments → Disconnect. Existing in-flight payments continue to process; new payments fall back to manual (you take the bank deposit yourself). Disconnecting doesn't delete your Stripe account, you still have it directly with Stripe.

A note on multi-entity

If you run more than one business under different ABNs (e.g. a building company and a maintenance company), you can connect multiple Stripe accounts to your Karven workspace and pick which one a given quote routes to. Settings → Payments → Multi-entity.

A common gotcha

Don't connect Stripe with your personal account thinking you'll "fix it later". Stripe's KYC is account-level, and changing the legal entity later means re-verifying from scratch. Use the right business entity from the start.