#Hugues
south shore
night shadow
Next time feel free to keep using the thread you still have open 🙂
Is there a reason you don't just want a yearly subcsription?
trim beacon
As our business is in insurance, it's the classical approach to send an invoice on the insured's subscription and then on yearly renewals.
night shadow
Do you'd send an invoice (that won't be paid) each month, and then an invoice at the end of the year for all 12 months?
trim beacon
We fetch monthly payments from insured's bank account but ideally we'd like to send them the invoice in advance.
night shadow
Can you put this in more concrete terms so I can understand? If I have a monthyl $10 subscription, what is the behavior of the monthly invoices (do they get paid automatically, somethign else?) and what are you expecting to see on that yearly invoice?
trim beacon
The monthly payments are charged and must be paid monthly. We'd sent an invoice (a document stating the monthly payments to be made) once a year and ahead of the time when the service takes effect.
night shadow
Aha! Gotcha I understand now. And that yearly invoice is just informational, you don't actually want it to be paid?
trim beacon
Exact. The problem with the default approach is that the invoice (the billing information) is sent monthly. We'd like to issue the document once a year ahead of the payments.
night shadow
Yeah I see the issue - there's no "out of the box" way to do this, but there's a couple of different workarounds you could try. In my opinion, the easiest would be to create the monthly subscriptions and then implement logic to create the yearly Invoices yourself through our Invoices API (https://stripe.com/docs/invoicing/integration) and mark it paid out of band.
trim beacon
But wouldn't I have to disable the sending of the monthly invoices (I mean the billing document sent monthly)?
night shadow
You still want those monthly invoices to be paid though, right? If it's a charge_automatically invoice I believe we only send the invoice to the customer if you have the receipt email setting turned on
trim beacon
How can I set this via your API?
night shadow
This is something you'd control through the collection_method param when you create the Subscription (https://stripe.com/docs/api/subscriptions/create#create_subscription-collection_method).
trim beacon
Is this configuration available even if our customers paid via Pre-Authorized Debits?
night shadow
I believe so! I'd recommend trying all of this in test mode to make sure it behaves as you expect, but it should work
Also to be clear - I think you have a lot of different options here, but it'll depend on how much you want to change about your integration and what specific invoices/lines items you want to see
trim beacon
Thanks for the suggestion & have a nice weekend.
night shadow
you too!