When invoicing a customer for products and services with recurring subscriptions (i.e. monthly, yearly), partners may want to automate creating and sending invoices, or automate the charging of a customer’s credit card. This can be done by editing the Invoicing settings for a particular account.
An account’s Invoicing settings are all off by default. To edit these settings for a particular account, go to Partner Center > Billing > Invoices, and view any previously-created invoice for the account you have chosen. Click the account name and select Edit Invoice settings.
Automatically generate and send invoices
Under the Invoice automation section, partners can configure how an individual account is invoiced for products and services with recurring subscriptions.
- Selecting Subscription invoices will cause a draft invoice for the recurring price of a product or service to be created automatically on the day that the product or service renews. If multiple products renew on the same day, they will be included in the same invoice.
- If a renewing product was purchased as part of a package on or after June 18, 2020, its package pricing will be respected on any automatic invoice as long as all products purchased in the package are still active on the date of renewal.
- If a renewing product was purchased as part of a package before June 18, 2020, any automatically-generated invoice will use the product's set retail price. We are currently investigating solutions to apply package pricing to subscriptions created before June 18, 2020.
- Selecting Automatically collect will cause any invoices that have been automatically generated to be sent and/or charged on the day that they are created.
Automatically generated and/or sent invoices can be viewed at any time on Partner Center > Billing > Invoices. These invoices will be tagged as Auto to differentiate them from manually created invoices.
Recipient and collection method
Partners can specify one of two Collection Methods for any of their accounts.
- Send Email: Send an automatically generated invoice to this account, which the customer can pay by manually entering their credit card. The invoice will be created with a due date 10 days from the date it is created.
- Charge Automatically: If a user on the account being invoiced has previously paid an invoice via credit card, their card will be automatically and securely stored by Stripe. If you have chosen to Automatically collect invoices to this account, the Charge Automatically setting will automatically charge their saved credit card and email a receipt for a successful charge.
- If the charge fails, you will be notified and your customer will receive a "Failed payment" email directing them to the invoice landing page, the customer can pay by manually entering their credit card. If they new credit card information, this new information will be saved for future purchases.
Partners can specify a default recipient for invoices by selecting a user from the account. If no users exist for the account, click + Add a new user to quickly add a user the account and designate them as an invoice recipient.