Send post-payment Invoices with Checkout

Learn how to send post-payment Invoices to your customers with Checkout.

You can configure Checkout to send detailed Invoices to your customers for successful one-time payments. For payment mode Sessions, follow this guide to learn how to create and send invoices to your non-subscribed customers. Because Checkout creates invoices automatically on all subscription mode Sessions, you don’t need any additional configuration.

Invoice creation for one-time payments in Checkout is not an Invoicing feature, and is priced separately. Review this support article to learn more.

The following guide assumes that you already integrated Checkout. If you haven’t, see the getting started guides.

Enable invoice creation

To enable invoice creation, set invoice_creation[enabled] to true when creating a Checkout session.

Command Line

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/checkout/sessions \
  -u sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc: \
  -d mode=payment \
  -d "invoice_creation[enabled]"=true \
  -d "line_items[0][price]"="{{ONE_TIME_PRICE_ID}}" \
  -d "line_items[0][quantity]"=1 \
  -d success_url="https://example.com" \
  -d cancel_url="https://example.com"

When you enable invoice_creation, there is no change to the Checkout Session interface. The existing experience and feature-set your customers are familiar with remains unchanged.

After the session

After the session, Stripe sends an invoice summary with links to download the invoice PDF and invoice receipt to the email address your customer provides during checkout.

Screenshot of the invoice PDF that customers can download from the invoice summary email

Customers can download the invoice PDF.

Screenshot of the invoice receipt that customers can download from the invoice summary email

Customers can download the invoice receipt.

Screenshot of the invoice summary email Stripe sends

The email sent to customers includes links to download the invoice PDF or receipt.

You need to enable the Email customers about successful payments Dashboard setting to have Stripe send invoice summary emails to your customers. You can prevent Stripe from sending these emails by disabling the setting.

You can also view the invoice in the Dashboard or access it programmatically by listening to the invoice.paid webhook event.

When you enable invoice creation in Checkout, Stripe emits an invoice.paid event as soon as the payment tied to the Checkout Session succeeds. The event contains the full Invoice object, which you can use to generate emails and trigger fulfillment logic. Follow the webhooks guide to set up a new webhook endpoint if you haven’t already.

Customizing the Invoice

You can use the invoice_data hash inside invoice_creation to further customize the invoice generated by the Checkout Session.

Command Line

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/checkout/sessions \
  -u sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc: \
  -d mode=payment \
  -d "invoice_creation[enabled]"=true \
  -d "invoice_creation[invoice_data][description]"="Invoice for Product X" \
  -d "invoice_creation[invoice_data][metadata][order]"=order-xyz \
  -d "invoice_creation[invoice_data][account_tax_ids][0]"=DE123456789 \
  -d "invoice_creation[invoice_data][custom_fields][0][name]"="Purchase Order" \
  -d "invoice_creation[invoice_data][custom_fields][0][value]"=PO-XYZ \
  -d "invoice_creation[invoice_data][rendering_options][amount_tax_display]"=include_inclusive_tax \
  -d "invoice_creation[invoice_data][footer]"="B2B Inc." \
  -d "line_items[0][price]"="{{ONE_TIME_PRICE_ID}}" \
  -d "line_items[0][quantity]"=1 \
  -d success_url="https://example.com" \
  -d cancel_url="https://example.com"

Review invoice best practices for your region to make sure you’re collecting the right information from your customers. Information like the customer’s billing and shipping addresses, phone number and tax ID appear on the resulting invoice.