#spencersr-subscription-invoice
brittle isle
Hello 👋
Juggling between a few threads at the moment 🙂 give me a few to catch up here
spare knoll
Hi 👋 I'm jumping in for @brittle isle for a bit.
Can you clarify for me what it is you are trying to achieve in terms of user experience?
dire wind
We need to generate invoices for future subscriptions in order to meet several requirements:
Due date relative to invoice before subscription starts
Users receive and PO mark invoices before a project ends on their side.
for instance - we need to bill $450,000 before the end of the year but for service that starts on the year or several months after the year rolls over.
I have a feeling I just need to be using invoicing instead for our annual subscriptions.. but it will require us to use metadata heavily for start/end.. as well as when we can build out our client implementations before hand. (real start).
Love to talk on the phone about this stuff.
spare knoll
Unfortunately we cannot offer phone calls at this time. Our current work streams require mostly async communication. However, let me try and reason out what you are trying to do.
- User requests a service that you provide
- Service fee is assessed
- Invoice is generated
- Subscription starts months later
- Subscription renews annuall (is there still the same lag between invoice and service?)
dire wind
ideally it would autobill after the initial invoice that covers implementation.
spare knoll
Right, but does the auto-generated invoice still need to lead the service start?
dire wind
no. Since at that time the user will be "in contract" according to the start/end of the subscription.
Typically they will know the billing anchor as well and work with that.
It would be stellar if we could invoice for partial payments toward a specific subscription (allowing us to use credit to some degree.. but not in such a way that credits would be applied to other subscriptions).
spare knoll
So is the initial payment a one-time setup fee? Or is that going to be recurring?
dire wind
The initial payment includes an annual user license product, an optional once only impementation fee, and an optional annual managed services product.
spare knoll
So what you could do is combine one-time fees (InvoiceItems created for the Customer) for those amounts and a free trial period for the length of time before the Subscription starts.
dire wind
free trials create the wrong amounts in the invoices. I've had a hard time coercing free trials and future anchors to work well together.
For instance. If I start up an annual subscription that lasts 3 cycles I often have to set the billing anchor to the following year in order for the initial invoice to be properly balanced (otherwise it will be more due to some funky calculations). Adding in a trial period makes it even wonkier.
I really wish I could just show y'all what's going on.. is there a paid support or managed services option?
wanton lily
catching up here one sec
ok read up and here's what I think might work
using this as your example
we need to bill $450,000 before the end of the year but for service that starts on the year or several months after the year rolls over.
Create a Subscription with trial_end but also add one off InvoiceItems to this Subscription on creation, so that you charge $X on creation of the Subscription, but don't charge the recurring Price until the trial ending date
spare knoll
@dire wind I've unarchived your thread, let's discuss here
dire wind
Great thank you.
I can't use a trial mode in order to initiate an invoice for a subscription since the initial invoice is $0 and the next one will only pop up on the billing cycle date. The billing cycle date can't be the same date as the start of the subscription when a trial is in use.
spare knoll
I can't use a trial mode in order to initiate an invoice for a subscription since the initial invoice is $0
This is incorrect
dire wind
When I do attempt to use a trial the following invoice, at least for annual subscriptions, shows a proper amount in the following invoice up top.. but down below in the totals it is usually lower due to some calculation issues.
spare knoll
Not if you create the InvoiceItem objects to represent the initial fees as I suggested
dire wind
OK so can any of what you are suggesting be done from the dashboard?
I'm fine using the api.. but I want to be sure I'm following along properly.
spare knoll
In general we use the APIs mostly, since this channel is for developers
dire wind
That's a given.
I am trying to understand if somebody with a job aid can handle creation of our subscriptions or if an API is the only resource for this. I've had a difficult time wrestling control away from sales and contracts folks.
That's besides the point. I'd love to work through what you are suggesting.
spare knoll
But what I was initially suggesting was you create Invoice Items for one-off fees at the start of your subscription. Those will get added to the invoice generated by the free trial so the final total will be the $0 subscription fee plus the one-off fees.
dire wind
OK. I'm not sure if what I am doing is different than what you are recommending. I add all the one-off products and their quantity to the subscription creation and set the start and end date and anchor date.
spare knoll
No, not the subscription creation
You create Invoice Items (via the Invoice Item API) for a given customer
spare knoll
You do this before you even start with the subscription
dire wind
Yup this was recommended in the past. I'm not charging for the one off fees ONLY
I need to charge for the subscription itself up front.
Let me test creating an invoice and then creating a subscription with... a dummy item?
dire wind
you didn't consider the amazing power of dummy items?
"Company appreciation: $0.00"
One thing that stopped us dead in our tracks when we attempted to test this out before was that sumetimes pending invoice items wasn't present in new customers.
And then I wasn't sure if tax would be automatically calculated since it was asking for a rate.. but I suppose I can alter the invoice after.
This also limited our timing quite a lot. In order to attach this invoice to the next subscription invoice we had to purposefully NOT include other subscriptions that may interfere.
Almost to the point where a customer needed two customer records in order to properly align this.
That way our 'payment realm' of only allowing ACH associated with a subscription would be honored.. while we use CC for monthly overages.
Yeh I don't see how this is going to work well - specifically since we would be creating one-off products for the annual products.. this just gets messy.
spare knoll
You would need to create the invoice items immediately before creating the subscription with the trial to generate the initial invoice.
But basically we do not support invoicing a customer currently for a subscription that does not start for multiple months out of the box.
dire wind
OK. We will end up needing to rely on subscription metadata linking to an invoice ID. If the invoice is paid then the invoice generated by the subscription will marked as paid or void after receiving a stripe webhook for a subscription invoice creation... I have a feeling this will mess up our records.
Not sure if I can void a subscription invoice and still show the subscription as active.. I'll find out!
Looks like the best solution right now is to generate an invoice that looks the part.. then create a subscription with a 100% discount.
When we generate an invoice we can't really tack on the date range for a specific product other than the memo/footer.. near as I can tell.
spare knoll
When you say "tack on a date range" which invoice are you talking about?
dire wind
when an invoice is generated by the subscription service there is a newline after a product name and then a date range.
Not an option when creating an invoice straight out
spare knoll
Just curious if you've messed with the InvoiceItem period
https://stripe.com/docs/api/invoiceitems/object#invoiceitem_object-period
dire wind
Thank you
I'll have to do a lot of this via the API and forego backup via manual input