#Iliyan-customer-balance
mystic crane
Hey, so you want to make a PI for $X and credit (?) the balance of customer Y for that amount?
nimble helm
Thanks for your quick response! I was trying to avoid that since I am a little paranoid when money is involved 😄 just wanted to confirm what's the best way to do that
mystic crane
What's the use case exactly? That's not exactly a normal flow
nimble helm
We offer a SAAS platform where you can create marketing campaigns. At the end of the creation wizard we collect payment information and charge the customer immediately. I think it would be better handled by issuing an invoice at the end of the month but since we're early stages we can't afford to chase customers that refuse to pay at the end of the billing period.
Would it make sense to create an invoice in that case and finalize it immediately?
mystic crane
Why not use Billing/subscriptions? Will handle all the recurring payment logic, customer credit, proration, etc
nimble helm
We tried going that route but we ran into a lot of proration edge cases (for our use case) when using the integrated Billing portal and can't afford to spin up our own
mystic crane
If you're not using a recurring payment, then I don't understand why you need to credit the customer
Are they not just paying $X one-time for access to the service?
nimble helm
for referrals and sign up bonus mainly
also in place of coupons since they're not supported in that case
mystic crane
Well, there's no connection between a one-time Payment Intent and a customer balance. So you'd need to manage those transactions and balance manually
mystic crane
But this is the API you'd need: https://stripe.com/docs/api/customer_balance_transactions/create
But a PI amount won't be automatically reduced on the basis of that balance
nimble helm
Yep.. I figured that already 😄