--- title: Simplified invoice creation slug: simplified-invoice-creation published_at: 2022-03-29 16:00:02 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:52:24 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, you'll see a new parameter in the invoicing API that allows you to create draft invoices and attach invoice items. This is a new and much-requested invoicing flow. Download the notebook and follow along. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 00:50 Setting up the notebook 02:40 Configure invoice parameters 04:20 Create invoice items 06:32 Finalize invoice 07:52 Conclusion ### Resources Code for this episode: https://gist.github.com/cjavilla-stripe/0c11afd766807906ce791dacf196fb12 Pending invoice items API reference: https://stripe.com/docs/api/invoices/create#create_invoice-pending_invoice_items_behavior Invoicing docs: https://stripe.com/docs/invoicing ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team at https://support.stripe.com/ or on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88 #Stripe #Payments tags: [stripe, payments, invoices, create invoice, create invoice item, stripe invoices, invoice, simplified invoice creation, more easily create invoices, @cjav_dev] views: 2505 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/simplified-invoice-creation youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awpcfRROb3A youtube_id: awpcfRROb3A embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/awpcfRROb3A thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/awpcfRROb3A/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Simplified invoice creation *Published: March 29, 2022* *Views: 2505* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awpcfRROb3A) [![Simplified invoice creation](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/awpcfRROb3A/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awpcfRROb3A) ## Description In this episode, you'll see a new parameter in the invoicing API that allows you to create draft invoices and attach invoice items. This is a new and much-requested invoicing flow. Download the notebook and follow along. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 00:50 Setting up the notebook 02:40 Configure invoice parameters 04:20 Create invoice items 06:32 Finalize invoice 07:52 Conclusion ### Resources Code for this episode: https://gist.github.com/cjavilla-stripe/0c11afd766807906ce791dacf196fb12 Pending invoice items API reference: https://stripe.com/docs/api/invoices/create#create_invoice-pending_invoice_items_behavior Invoicing docs: https://stripe.com/docs/invoicing ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team at https://support.stripe.com/ or on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88 #Stripe #Payments ## Transcript hey what's up welcome back if you have ever worked with the invoice api using stripe you know that typically you need to create an invoice item or several invoice items before creating an invoice and then when you create the invoice it'll sort of sweep up those invoice items we recently released a brand new attribute that you can pass when creating an invoice that will cause it to wait or exclude any pending invoice items and allow you to create a draft invoice that you can attach invoice items to and then finalize this is extremely exciting because we've been hearing a lot of folks ask for this so i'm going to go through the process today for the new flow that you might use for creating and finalizing invoices [Music] we're going to use a visual studio code today and we're going to create a new.net interactive notebook now by default it starts out as c-sharp but we're actually going to use python today so here we're going to save this as demo2.i python notebook and we want this to actually be python not c sharp we're going to say import stripe then we're going to set our api key to our api key which we can grab from the docs or from the dashboard and once we have our api key set then we can run this cell i'm just going to use this play button and i'm going to select version 3.9.5 this is just a version of python i have installed already all right let's add a new cell we're going to add new code and this is going to use this stripe customer create snippet we're going to pass in our description as just invoicing customer we also need to pass an email address so that we can send the send an invoice to the customer so here we'll just say jenny.rosen example.com we'll also give a name for jenny and we want to store the result of this api call in a new variable called customer and for now what we can do is just print out the customer's id now what's nice is this variable will be passed down to future cells so we can run this with control enter and now we see the id of the customer printed out the next step is to create an invoice now we can directly create the invoice this is really exciting so stripe invoice create and the customer that we're going to pass in is customer.id now we want to pass in this new parameter here pending invoice items behavior and we can set it to include include and require exclude and um so what we want to do is we want to actually exclude any pending invoice items that are on that customer this might be invoice items that are part of a subscription so when a subscription renews invoice items are created and they're swept up when the invoice sort of cycles but in the case that we want to send just a one-time invoice we want to exclude any of those so that we have a draft invoice that we can work with so i'm going to pass in exclude here now i also want to pass in an argument that allows us to specify that we don't want to collect automatically because this customer doesn't have a payment method yet so i'm going to set the collection method to send invoice and that should create an invoice for us we can save this off as invoice now when we're passing send invoices the collection method we also want to pass some number of days until the invoice is due so this is going to email a customer with a link to a hosted page where they can go and enter their payment details and they need to pay the invoice by some specific date so we can say days until due is seven we'll give them seven days to pay their invoice and then finally we'll just print out the invoice.id and again we can run this with control enter and that is our new invoice id what's nice is that we can actually grab this if we pull up the terminal here we can use the stripe cli to say stripe get and then paste in the id of the invoice and that will retrieve the json for that invoice so here we can see that the status of the invoice is in a draft and there are no invoice line items for this invoice just yet okay so that's going to be the next step so here we're going to create some an invoice item so we'll say stripe dot in or actually let's see stripe invoice items create great so we need to pass in the customer and we need to pass in um some price data so actually we can also specify the invoice now so we're going to say invoice dot id and then we also want to pass in price now we could pass in the id of a price if we had one created already i'm going to pass in price data to dynamically create a new ad hoc price we're going to specify the currency is usd and the unit amount is going to be i don't know a hundred dollars and we'll set the tax behavior to exclude that means that we want to add taxes on to this if they're applicable that'll happen on the hosted invoices page and we're going to set the product to some product now to figure out what my products are jump back into the terminal and use stripe products list and that will list out all of the products that i've configured in the stripe dashboard i'm just going to grab the id of this first one and use that as our product okay so this will should create an invoice item for us and we'll print out again its id okay control enter and it crashed let's see invalid price data tax behavior must be one of inclusive or exclusive so i said exclude so it should be exclusive all right run it again all right now we have the invoice item id so if we went to go grab this invoice again from the terminal if we said stripe get paste in that invoice id then uh we will see that the the status is still draft but now we should have some invoice items and we do so this is the newly created invoice item inside of the lines this is the new invoice item that we just created and it's attached to that specific invoice so that's fantastic and the last thing we need to do is just finalize the invoice so we can say that stripe.invoice.final invoice and pass in the id of the invoice and then if we just print out invoice dot id and maybe print invoice dot status then if we run this we will see that we have an open invoice so this is the id of the open invoice we could also um let's see we also want to look at another property of the invoice and that is going to be where we're going to send the customer the end customer so as part of the invoice object we now have a hosted invoice url and an invoice pdf so they could download that if they wanted but in practice we're going to send them off to this url so let's take a look at what that is so on the hosted invoice url this is like the the url to which you would send your customer to go pay their invoice they can look at the invoice details here um they see that we're buying a test product one of those for one hundred dollars and we can use several different payment method types if we wanted and we're just going to use the test card today and we will click pay and that will successfully pay for the invoice now you can download our invoice pdf or you can download the receipt for that invoice but that is sort of the end-to-end flow now using this brand new pending invoice items behavior parameter very powerful stuff thanks so much for watching and we'll see in the next --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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