Composite, auth-rate × inverse decline × inverse dispute × payout-on-time × Radar-clean share. The CFO single-number.
At a glance
A 0, 100 composite that compresses four payment-health signals (auth rate, decline rate, dispute rate, payout punctuality) into one number a non-finance founder can read at a glance. Designed for the question “is my Stripe doing what it should be doing today, yes or no?”
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Stripe data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A subscription brand running on Shopify with Stripe as the primary processor. The 7-day window covers 06 Apr 26 to 12 Apr 26.
Composite = 0.35 × 93.8 + 0.25 × 76.5 + 0.20 × 90.6 + 0.20 × 85.7 = 32.83 + 19.13 + 18.12 + 17.14 = 87.2
Score 87 is healthy (above the 70 alert threshold). What’s interesting:
- Decline rate is dragging the score the most. At 4.7% it cost 5.9 composite points (vs an ideal score of 100). Look at Stripe Decline Rate and the outcome.reason breakdown to see if it’s
do_not_honor,insufficient_funds, or a Radar rule firing too aggressively. - Disputes are well below the danger zone. 0.187% is comfortably under the 0.9% Visa threshold. No action needed but watch the trend.
- One late payout. Could be a banking holiday, weekend timing, or a temporary Stripe hold. Usually self-resolves.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Stripe Dashboard: The Stripe Dashboard does NOT have a single “Payment Health” composite, this card synthesises one from four Stripe-native metrics. The closest equivalent screens:- Payments → Authorizations for auth-rate context.
- Payments → Failed payments for decline-rate context.
- Disputes for dispute-rate context.
- Balance → Payouts for payout-on-time context.
Cross-connector reconciliation:
This card is a Stripe-only composite, it has no direct counterpart on other connectors. The closest is
paypal.pp_payment_health_score, which uses the same composite shape but with PayPal’s success / decline / dispute / payout signals.
For end-to-end revenue-side reconciliation see stripe.stripe_total_revenue, which has explicit cross-connector reconciliation against the commerce platforms.
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
My score is 88 but I feel like everything is fine, why isn’t it 100? A score of 100 would mean: 100% auth rate, 0% decline rate, 0% dispute rate, 100% payouts on time. This basically never happens in production, even healthy stores run at 92, 96% auth rate (some declines are just bank-side issuer behaviour the merchant can’t fix). 85, 95 is the healthy band; below 70 is the trigger. My score dropped 8 points overnight, what should I look at first? Open the four component cards in this order: Decline Rate (most likely), Auth Rate, Dispute Rate, then Payout Age. Decline rate is amplified ×5 in the formula so even a 1% absolute jump is 1.25 score points; this is usually the cause. Then check Decline Reasons to see which decline category drove it (issuer-sidedo_not_honor, customer-side insufficient_funds, or merchant-side Radar/3DS rules).
The dispute amplifier feels punishing, why is it ×50?
Because Visa and Mastercard run chargeback monitoring programs at 0.9% and above. Crossing those thresholds can suspend your merchant account or force enrolment in expensive programs (Visa VDMP, Mastercard Excessive Chargeback Merchant). The composite is designed to drop below 70 well before you hit those thresholds, so the alert fires early enough for you to react.
Does Stripe have an official “health score”?
No. Stripe surfaces individual component metrics on the dashboard but doesn’t provide a single composite. This card synthesises one. The four components and weights were chosen by the Vortex IQ team based on (a) what merchant CFOs ask first when they open the dashboard and (b) which metrics correlate with downstream revenue impact when they drift.
Can I customise the weights or amplifiers?
Not yet, the formula is fixed in the manifest. If you’d like a different weighting (e.g. weight payout-on-time higher because you have very tight cash-flow), open a request, the formula lives in stripe.yaml and is straightforward to add as a per-merchant override.
My score is 70 but I have 0% disputes, how is that possible?
The auth-rate component (35% weight) and decline-rate component (25% weight) together carry 60% of the formula. If your auth rate is 80% (low) and decline rate is 18% (high), the score can fall to 70 with disputes at 0%. This is actually common during a card-issuer outage or a Radar rule mis-fire.
Why isn’t refund rate in the formula?
Refunds aren’t a health signal at the payment-processing layer, they’re a fulfilment / product-quality signal. A merchant with 0% disputes and a 20% refund rate has a happy-customer-but-bad-product problem; that’s not what this card is designed to detect. Watch Stripe Refund Rate separately.
My multi-currency store, does the score work for me?
Yes. The components are rates, not amounts, so multi-currency stores get a single, valid health score. The auth/decline/dispute rates are computed across all charges regardless of currency. Payout-on-time looks at payouts in each currency the merchant settles in.