Stripe Invoices

The first two important objects in Stripe are Charge and Customer.

Let's talk about the third important object: Invoice. Here's the idea: right now, we simply charge the Customer. But instead of doing that, we could add invoice items to the Customer, create an Invoice for those items, and then pay that Invoice.

To the user, this feels the same. But in Stripe, instead of having a charge, you will have an Invoice full of invoice items, and a charge to pay that invoice. Why do we care? Well first, it let's you have detailed line-items - like two separate items if our customer orders 2 products.

And second, invoices are central to handling subscriptions. In fact, you'll find the Invoice API documentation under the subscription area. But, it can be used for any charges.

Creating & Paying the Invoice

Let's hook this up. First, instead of creating a Stripe Charge, create a Stripe InvoiceItem:

But all the data is the same.

Below that, add $invoice = \Stripe\Invoice::create() and pass that an array with customer set to $user->getStripeCustomerId():

Finally, add $invoice->pay():

Let's break this down. The first part creates an InvoiceItem in Stripe, but nothing is charged yet. Then, when you create an Invoice, Stripe looks for all unpaid invoice items and attaches them to that Invoice. The last line charges the customer to pay that invoice's balance.

Usually, when you create an Invoice, Stripe will charge the customer immediately. But, if you have web hooks setup - something we'll talk about in the second course - that will delay charging the user by 1 hour. Calling ->pay() guarantees that this happens right now.

Ok, go back and try this out. Find a wonderful and high-quality product, and add it to the cart. Checkout using your favorite fake credit card and fake information.

Looks like it worked! And since this user already is a Stripe customer, refresh that customer's page in Stripe. Check this out! We have two payments and we can see the Invoice. If you click that, the Invoice has 1 line item and a related Charge object.

One InvoiceItem per Product

This now gives us more flexibility. Since sheep love to shop, they'll often buy multiple products. In fact, let's go buy some shears, and some Sheerly Conditioned. If we checked out right now, this would show up as one giant line item for $106.00 on the Invoice. We can do better than that.

In OrderController, around the InvoiceItem part, add a foreach, over $this->get('shopping_cart')->getProducts() as $product. In other words, let's loop over all the actual products in our cart and create a separate InvoiceItem for each. All we need to do is change the amount to be: $product->getPrice() * 100. We can even improve the description: set it to $product->getName():

Now, if we eventually send the user a receipt, it's going to be very easy to look on this Stripe invoice and see exactly what we charged them for.

Test time! Put in our awesome fake information, hit ENTER... and no errors.

In Stripe, click back to the customer page and find the new invoice - for $106. Click on that. Yes! 2 crystal clear invoice line items.

So yes, you can just charge customers. But if you create an Invoice with detailed line items, you're going to have a much better accounting system in the long run.