Managing Cashflow When You Are Scaling Fast

9 min · text · Advanced

You hit $30k/mo. Your account is screaming profitable. And then Stripe holds 25% of payouts for 90 days, Shopify Payments takes 1-3 days to settle, and you cannot pay your suppliers. Cashflow killed you, not the product. Here is the trap and how to walk around it.

The payout schedule (and how it hides money from you)

Shopify Payments (powered by Stripe) settles:

Standard: T+2 (Monday sale settles Wednesday, minus holidays/weekends)
Expedited: T+1 available to some accounts (additional fee, not worth it unless you hit >$50k/mo)

This seems fine. Then Stripe holds a percentage.

Stripe's reserve structure

New accounts (first 90 days or until proven history): 7-day rolling reserve

Meaning: if you process $5,000 on Monday, $4,650 settles, $350 goes into a reserve that is released 7 days later
Impact: you always have 1 week of revenue floating. At 0k/mo, that is