If you want to change the Stripe account connected to your Outseta account, you can absolutely do so. That said, you'll want to proceed carefully or you can end up in a scenario where you lose the payment information associated with your customers and need to request that they update their credit card information.
 
By following the guidance in this article, you can easily connect you new Stripe account to Outseta with very little risk.

Customer IDs and Card IDs

Outseta never stores any of your customers' credit card information—instead we use tokens that we refer to as the Stripe Customer Token and Stripe Payment Token that allow us to reference / connect charges to specific customers and credit cards within your Stripe account. Stripe calls these the Customer ID and Card ID.
 
The critical concept to understand is that the Customer ID and Card ID are specific to the Stripe account that's currently connected to Outseta. If you change Stripe accounts, the new Stripe account will not have the same Customer ID and Card ID values and Outseta will then not be able to charge the customer—the connection made via these tokens is broken.

Migrating data from one Stripe account to another

In order to change Stripe accounts, you'll need to copy the Customer ID and Card ID values from your original Stripe account to your new one. Stripe’s self-serve data copy service allows you to copy customer and payment data from one Stripe account to another another.

You may complete the copy yourself from your Stripe Dashboard, following the steps outlined here: 

https://stripe.com/docs/account/data-migrations/pan-copy-self-serve

This makes this process very low risk—your original Stripe account will continue to have all of your existing customer data, so you can simply revert back to your original account at any time.

The Customer ID values will remain the same when you copy your data across accounts, but the Card ID values will change.

After copying your data, you'll be provided with a mapping file with the following headers:

  • customer_id_old
  • source_id_old
  • customer_id_new
  • source_id_new

With this data in hand, you'll need to complete an account import in Outseta to update your existing accounts with a new Stripe Payment Token / Card ID value—this will be the source_id_new value from the mapping file.

That's all we're doing here—we're performing a bulk update to your existing Outseta accounts to update the pre-existing Stripe Payment Token value with this new source_id_new value.

Updating existing accounts with the new source_id_value

1. Start by going to CRM > ACCOUNTS and exporting all of your current account data.

IMPORTANT: Make sure that you don't have any filters applied before you export your data—if you do, only accounts that meet your filtered criteria will be exported. In particular, it's very common that you may have Billing Stage filters applied on this page.

This will give you a spreadsheet with all of your current account information including your existing Stripe Customer Token and Stripe Payment Token.

2. You can delete all columns from this spreadsheet with exception of the Account Information and Credit Card Information fields outlined here:

https://go.outseta.com/support/kb/articles/79OjXZQE/how-to-import-subscribers

Specifically, the sheet will need to include:

Account Information

  • Name
  • UID
  • Account Stage
  • Primary Contact Email

This information tells Outseta which account needs to be updated.

Payment Information Information

  • Stripe Customer Token (Customer ID)
  • Stripe Payment Token (Card ID)

This information is the updated credit card information that gets re-imported to Outseta so that we can charge the appropriate card going forward. Please note that none of these values will change except the Stripe Payment Token included in your export file—this will be updated to the source_id_new value from your migration file.

You do not need to reimport subscription information or any other fields contained in the downloaded import file—only the information outlined above.

3. Merge the data in your export file with the data in the migration file—the Customer ID values will be the same across these data sets, so you can use this common field to merge the data sets together.

Replace the old Stripe Payment Token values in the export file with the new source_id_new values from the migration file. Your updated file is now ready for import. 

4. With your import file prepped, now is a good time to connect your new Stripe account to Outseta. Go to BILLING > SETTINGS and click Clear Stripe Settings to disconnect from your existing Stripe account.

You can then reconnect to your new Stripe account—it's also a good idea to put your account on Manual payment processing mode at the bottom of this page. This ensures that invoices are still generated but no payments are collected while you're in the process of making these changes. Click SAVE. 

5. Once you've connected to your new Stripe account, you're ready to import your file with the updated payment information. Go to CRM > ACCOUNTS and click Import Accounts and then Upload File. Our data import tool will then walk you through the account import process.

Once your import is completed, Outseta will be updated with the appropriate Stripe Payment Token to charge your customers out of your new Stripe account. You can test this if you like by manually creating an invoice and attempting to charge one of your customers. This will validate that the updated payment information is working properly.

6. Once you've validated that the updated payment information is working, go to BILLING > SETTINGS and change your account back to Automatic payment processing mode.

7. If you need help with this process, please complete the data migration process to copy your customer and payment information across your Stripe accounts. If you email the resulting migration file to support(at)outseta.com, we can help you prepare the updated file for import into Outseta.