gesundheit-tax-subs

[jolly geyser]

hello, sure ask away

[lofty notch]

hello!

Basically I asked the same question last night but there was little help during that time period, let me grab the previous conversation

so, the scenario is:

• the prices of our products are before-taxes
• a new customer, with no payment method attached, decides to buy a subscription of that product
• then, they will see on the side of their screen the "invoice" they will be paying; on the other side, we prompt them to enter their billing information (guaranteed to be card)

what we want after this is that the user sees their invoice being updated with taxes based on their entered billing address
on the backend, when they initially press on checkout, we generate an invoice through the API endpoint subscriptionService.CreateAsync (using Stripe.NET)

then we return the client_secret to the frontend and let stripe elements take care of rendering the invoice.

so yeah. basically we wanted the invoice to be updated as the new user enters their credit card info.

[lofty notch]

hello?

[jolly geyser]

stretched across multiple threads! getting to yours in a sec

ok so before you create the Subscription, you want to show your customer their estimated total with tax, right?

[lofty notch]

yep

sorry, i was taken away as well

but here's the problem: we wanted to collect taxes based on our customer's billing address. That means technically everywhere Stripe supports.

[jolly geyser]

yeah so what you can do for that is try using the UpcomingInvoice endpoint to "preview" what creating a subscription for that customer would look like and preview taxes on that

[lofty notch]

hmm, does this affect the flow as mentioned above?

[lofty notch]

this

and if an upcomingInvoice's automatic_tax is set, where will it get the billing address?

[jolly geyser]

it should get billing address on the PaymentMethod attached to the Customer, that you pass as default_payment_method on the upcoming invoice

hmm, does this affect the flow as mentioned above?
does not affect that, you preview an upcomingInvoice to show what the customer is signing up for, before actually creating it

[lofty notch]

I'm reading the API on using UpcomingInvoice. It accepts either a customer or a subscription or subscription_items as parameters. What should I pass in when the subscription itself isn't created yet?

[lofty notch]

also, the flow only attaches the payment method to the customer when they pay the invoice, so the customer will not have any payment method attached before they pay

[mighty swallow]

If the subscription hasn't been created yet you should be passing in subscription_items along with customer

[lofty notch]

i thought subscription items are only created when a subscription is created

[mighty swallow]

Typically yes, but if you're specifically trying to preview the invoice for a subscription that hasn't been created yet we let you simulate it's creation with the upcoming invoices endpoint by passing in the fields you would set when you create a subscription (example: subscription_trial_end, subscription_cancel_at, etc).

[lofty notch]

so, i should specify

• subscription_items (since i don't have the id for them because they don't exist, i guess i should supply price_ids instead?)
• the start and end date of the intended subscription
• customer_id

[lofty notch]

also this. I was trying to creating a subscription with automatic_tax.enabled=true, with a customer that has no payment method. That led to a Stripe Exception since stripe doesn't know where to determine the tax region.

[mighty swallow]

Yes, you'd specify the customer and subscription_items. You'd only need to specify subscription_start_date if you want to simulate it being created not at the time request is being made, and end date (cancellation) is also optional (you only need to set it if you need it)

If they don't have a payment method then this doesn't really work with automatic tax

[lofty notch]

so i guess we will have to collect the payment method first?

[mighty swallow]

Yeah, if your goal is specifically to test automatic tax with upcoming invoice, I think your only choice would be to collect the payment method first

[lofty notch]

we'll have to think about this for a bit

I'm going to jump out of this thread for now, since i have another question to ask

completely unrelated to this

[mighty swallow]

You can still ask it here!

[lofty notch]

mm oko

ok

so we are thinking about preview invoices (well yeah upcoming invoices)

long before the renew period

[mighty swallow]

When you say "long before the renew period" do you mean a different billing cycle, or is it the same billing cycle but the renewal date is just a ways off?

[lofty notch]

same billing cycle, same renewal date

but being able to have the invoice generated so that the user has a pdf to look at

[mighty swallow]

If you want to generate an invoice for the user to look at that would be something you need to make yourself, but upcoming invoice should still work perfectly fine with this

[lofty notch]

ok, got it. it's just a matter of how we generate the pdf using the info returned through upcoming invoice

[mighty swallow]

Yup! and that part would be up to you to implement

[lofty notch]

cool, thanks!