Invoicing
OpenMeter can synchronize invoices to Stripe Invoicing. This allows you to deliver invoices via Stripe and collect payments automatically. Stripe Invoicing makes it easy to automate tax calculations, accounts receivable, collect payments, and reconcile transactions.
Stripe will charge a fee for each invoice, tax calculations and payment according to your contract with them. Please see the Stripe Fees page for more information.
How it works?
When you have the Stripe app installed and set as a billing profile, OpenMeter will automatically synchronize invoices to Stripe Invoicing. OpenMeter will create a Stripe Invoice for each OpenMeter invoice and mark invoices finalize to kick of the payment collection in Stripe.
You can have multiple billing profiles with OpenMeter. This is useful if you have different payment collection methods for different customers. For example, you can have a billing profile for self-service customers with automatic payment collection and a billing profile for enterprise customers with email invoicing.
Configure Payment Collection
You can configure the payment collection method in the Billing Profile. OpenMeter supports two payment collection methods with Stripe:
- Charge Automatically: (default) OpenMeter will tell Stripe to collect charges with the default payment method for the customer. Great for self service use-cases.
- Send Invoice: OpenMeter will tell Stripe to email the invoice to the customer with the payment instructions. Great for enterprise clients.
To be able to collect charges automatically, you need to have a default payment method set the customer.
When you add a payment method to a customer in OpenMeter, that method becomes the default. However, if you leave the payment method field in OpenMeter blank, OpenMeter will fall back to the default payment method set in Stripe (if any).
To send an invoice, you need to have an email address set for the Stripe Customer.
Unfortunately, Stripe does not provide an API to set the email address for invoices. So you need to make sure to set the email address for the Stripe Customer via the Stripe Dashboard. The email address on the OpenMeter Customer will be ignored with Stripe Invoicing.
When a paid subscription is created, OpenMeter will enforce that a customer linked with Stripe has either a default payment method or an email address depending on the collection method settings.
If you have both self-service and enterprise clients, you can create a separate billing profile for each group and configure the payment collection method appropriately. Then you can set the self-service billing profile the default and link enterprise customers to the enterprise billing profile. This way your self service clients will be charged automatically and your enterprise clients will receive an email invoice.
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