#jakub - Invoices
wild saddle
Hello! Can you provide a request ID showing the error about the email? Here's how you can find a request ID: https://support.stripe.com/questions/finding-the-id-for-an-api-request
maiden cradle
yep, just a sec let me re-create the situation with fresh data
please check req_3gRorzDeYrAC9e
wild saddle
Looking, hang on...
If you make that same call with auto_advance set to false does it still give you the same error?
maiden cradle
yes it does, see req_pzTtOZztYzFLq5
wild saddle
I'm so sorry I missed this message! @wheat mist is here now and should be able to help you out!
wheat mist
👋 Give me a minute and I"ll take a look @maiden cradle
maiden cradle
of course, thank you
wheat mist
Quick question - when you have one of the Invoices you updated to be send_invoice w/o an email, what happens when you try and finalize it?
maiden cradle
I'll try it, give me minute
it appears to work, request ids for reference
- create
req_AmJ0UNjZa8G31F - modify
req_JybSZ4mR0sEESJ - finalize
req_INTOpb3iMRoCln
as mentioned I've disabled the automatic invoice e-mails in the settings, maybe wouldn't have worked if it was enabled, I could try that as well if you'd like
but our use-case is that we'll send the invoice through a different channel outside of stripe, at least for now
wheat mist
Interesting - so I've looked at some internal sources and it sounds like we recently changed behavior to allow for Invoice to be created through the dashboard w/o an email address to support the exact flow you talk about (where you send the invoice in a different channel outside of Stripe).
I think for now, it's fine for you to continue using this workaround you've found
maiden cradle
is there a chance it'll make it to the API?
wheat mist
I don't believe it's on the roadmap, but I can flag it to the team as feedback and hopefully they'll implement it
maiden cradle
thank you, that'd be great 👍 is there a way for me to send feedback like that directly? because there's one more inconsistency I think I've found during the development of our, probably a bit unusual, invoicing flow with Stripe
wheat mist
Out of curiosity what's the inconsistency?
maiden cradle
well, our flow is that we want to invoice clients not monthly, but based on some event happening in our app; for this reason, we need to create an invoice and add invoice items to it
I needed to prevent a race condition (when trying to create 2 invoices for a customer at the same time), so one approach I was toying with was that it's possible to create an invoice item for a customer, then create an invoice and then delete the invoice item, which leaves you with empty invoice (which you can add items to later)
it would be great if it was possible to create the invoice first, and add items later (since it's a draft it shouldn't matter; it's already possible through the dashboard by the way), because then you don't have to deal with possible race conditions when you want to create 2 invoices for a customer at roughly the same time
however, we worked around this by creating the invoices through a queue in the end, so we didn't use this
I hope this makes sense, it's a bit hard to explain why I think it should be needed
in short, it's not possible to create empty invoice directly (it says there are no invoice items), but it's possible to create an empty invoice by creating an invoice item, then creating an invoice (which will contain the item), when deleting the said item and it's also possible to create an empty invoice manually through the dashboard (with the intention of adding items later)
wheat mist
Thanks for all that context! You're not the only one who's requested this feature (I hear it come up pretty frequently). I don't have a lot of context into why the Invoices flow was designed like this, but I can definitely add your feedback to the existing request we have with the team
You're also welcome to write into support (https://support.stripe.com/contact) with feedback directly, but depending on the feedback it may be easier to surface it here for one of us to flag internally
maiden cradle
actually about this issue I've already talked to support before, since I didn't know you guys have this discord, so it's possible they've already passed the feedback