The Zettle integration connects to Starling’s Business Toolkit, streamlining your Zettle bookkeeping, so that you can correctly account for your Zettle sales, advances and fees. The Toolkit automatically captures the VAT on Zettle transactions, which feeds into your VAT calculations for submission to HMRC.

As the Toolkit supports cash accounting, for each day that you have transactions processed through Zettle (whether that’s card payments, cash, refunds, invoice payments, advance downpayments, etc.), the integration with Starling automatically surfaces these as ‘external transactions’ in the Bookkeeping section of the Toolkit.

The Toolkit groups and totals your daily transactions based on the Zettle transaction type. For instance, any sales processed through Zettle, the Toolkit will create ‘external transactions’, per VAT rate, per day. All of these ‘external transactions’ will be marked as Zettle transactions – and to ensure accurate bookkeeping, we recommend these aren’t deleted. 

When you receive your payout directly from Zettle (displayed as ‘Paypal Pte’), we’ll mark the incoming payment to Starling as a ‘Transfers’, not ‘Revenue’. This is to avoid duplicate sales entries as external transactions that are automatically created for daily sales. To avoid double counting, we recommend the spending category for the Zettle payout is kept as ‘Transfers’. If your Zettle payout is initially to Paypal before being transferred to Starling Bank, you’ll have to categorise the Zettle proportion of the Paypal payout as ‘Transfers’ yourself.

Cash payments processed through Zettle will be included in the external transactions that are automatically created through this integration. To avoid double counting sales, you should change the category of any Zettle cash deposits to ‘Transfers’ (as the cash will already have been counted as ‘Revenue’).

For more information on exactly how the Zettle integration works with the Business Toolkit, watch our How-To video.