Stripe Invoicing lets you build an itemized invoice, through the dashboard or the API, set a due date and payment terms, and Stripe emails it to the customer with its own hosted payment page attached. Unpaid invoices can send automatic reminders on a schedule you set. We don't create your invoices for you. We build what happens the moment one actually gets paid, or doesn't.
1. Add or select the customer. Every Stripe invoice needs a Customer object attached, so pick an existing one or create a new customer record with a name and email first.
2. Add invoice items. Attach one or more existing Prices from your Stripe catalog, or add one-off line items with their own description and amount for anything that doesn't fit a saved Product and Price.
3. Set the collection method. Choose "send invoice," which emails it to the customer and waits for them to pay manually by a due date, or "charge automatically," which bills a payment method already on file instead of waiting.
4. Set the due date and any memo text. This is where net-15, net-30, or whatever terms you actually offer get defined, along with anything you want printed on the invoice itself.
5. Finalize and send it. Finalizing locks the invoice in and assigns it a number; sending it, or letting Stripe's automatic reminders do the work if you've turned those on, is what actually puts it in front of the customer.
An invoice marked paid in Stripe doesn't, by itself, mean anything to the rest of your business. If you run your books in QuickBooks or another accounting system, that invoice and the Stripe fee taken out of it still have to land there correctly, and a Stripe payout almost never matches an invoice total one for one once fees are factored in. We've written about that specific reconciliation gap for QuickBooks here.
The other place this breaks down is volume. Stripe's dashboard is fine for creating one invoice at a time, but if invoices are supposed to go out whenever a project hits a milestone, a contract renews, or a deal closes in a CRM, someone's either copying details into Stripe by hand for every single one or it isn't happening on schedule at all. That's what the Invoicing API is for: generating the invoice straight from whatever system already knows the work is done, instead of treating that knowledge as something a person has to transcribe.
When a project tool marks a milestone complete or a CRM deal closes, an automation creates and sends the matching Stripe invoice itself, line items included, instead of someone translating that update into an invoice by hand.
The moment a Stripe invoice is marked paid, we can flip a flag in your CRM, release a deliverable, or kick off onboarding, so the next step doesn't sit waiting on someone to check whether the money actually landed.
A renewal, a milestone payment, a retainer: tell us what triggers it today, and we'll look at whether that trigger can create the Stripe invoice itself.
If a milestone, a renewal date, or a closed deal is what tells you an invoice needs to go out, that trigger can usually create the invoice itself instead of waiting for someone to notice and build it manually. Invoicing is just this page's example; n-frames automates whatever handoff in your business is still running through a person instead of the system that already has the information.
Let's talk →There's no separate subscription fee for most accounts to use Invoicing itself, but Stripe adds a small percentage on top of its normal processing rate specifically for invoices that get paid, separate from the rate on a regular card charge. Check Stripe's current pricing page for the exact add-on rate rather than assuming it matches a standard transaction.
Yes. The Stripe dashboard has a full invoice creation flow built in: add a customer, add items, set terms, send it, with no API calls required. The API version matters once invoices need to generate themselves from something happening in another system, rather than a person creating each one individually.
Nothing happens automatically beyond what you've configured. Stripe can send reminder emails on a schedule you set, and the invoice itself just stays open and overdue until it's paid, voided, or marked uncollectible. Chasing it further, a call, a second channel, a late fee, is a decision and a build on your side, not something Stripe handles on its own.
Not on its own. See our QuickBooks + Stripe integration guide for why a Stripe payout almost never matches an invoice total directly, and what actually has to happen to reconcile the two correctly.
An invoice goes to a specific customer with payment terms and a due date, built for billing someone after work is already agreed to. Checkout is a payment page you send someone to at the moment they're buying, with no due date or terms involved. Use an invoice for billing after the fact; use Checkout for a payment happening right now.