Invoice for a one-time payment on Stripe

Question

Does Stripe generate invoices for one-time payments (not subscriptions)?

It seems in the docs that invoices are only part of their "Subscriptions" feature.

Curmudgeon

Answer 1

Stripe provides 2 types of invoices: "One-off Invoices" (https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/one-off) and Subscription Invoices (https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/subscription).

Stripe also automatically generates a hosted invoice url that you can send to customers and they can pay the invoice, as well as automatically generates a PDF of each invoice. Both of these items can be found in the response from "retrieve an invoice" in the API. (https://stripe.com/docs/api/invoices/retrieve?lang=python)

Enterostomy

Answer 2

Invoices are mostly associated with Subscriptions. Those are not invoices that you send to your customers though. They are objects representing what is bundled into a charge for a recurring payment.

When you create one-time payments via the API you use Charges which are separate from Invoices.

Stripe does support email receipts though that would be sent to your customers. You can read more about this in their documentation here

Philipphilipa

How to generate invoice PDF for these charges? – Nakesha

That is not something Stripe supports. – Philipphilipa

Answer 3

You can create an invoice for a one-time item with the following steps considering the default payment method is chargeable.

1. Create an Invoice Item

   Stripe::InvoiceItem.create({ customer: '<customer_id>', price: '<price_id>', quantity: 10 })

2. Create Invoice

This invoice will include the previously created invoice items.

Stripe::Invoice.create({
  customer: '<customer_id',
})

It will return the invoice id

3. Finalize Invoice

   Stripe::Invoice.finalize_invoice( <invoice_id>, )

4. Pay invoice

   Stripe::Invoice.pay(<invoice_id>)

Spur