Customers

Learn how to use the Customer resource with Stripe Billing.

The Customer resource is a core entity within Stripe. Use it to store all of the profile, billing, and tax information required to bill a customer for subscriptions and one-off invoices.

Manage customers

Create a customer for every new user or business you want to bill. When creating a new customer, set a minimum customer profile to help create useful invoices and enable Smart Retries (dunning). After creating and configuring this customer, use it to create a subscription and issue one-off invoices.

You can create and manage customers on the Customers page when you don’t want to use code to create a customer, or if you want to manually bill a customer with a one-off invoice.

Note

You can also create a customer in the Dashboard during invoice creation.

Create a customer

When you create a new customer, you can set their account and billing information, such as Email, Name, and Country. You can also set a customer’s preferred language, currency, and other important details.

To create a customer, complete these steps:

Verify that the customer doesn’t already exist.
Click Add customer, or press N, on the Customers page.
At a minimum, enter your customer’s Name and Account email.
Click Add customer in the dialog.

Edit a customer

To edit a customer’s profile, complete these steps:

Find the customer you want to modify and click the name on the Customers page.
In the account information page, select Actions > Edit information.
Make your changes to the customer profile.
Click Update customer.

Delete a customer

To delete a customer, complete these steps:

Find the customer you want to delete on the Customers page.
Click the checkbox next to your customer’s name followed by Delete. You can also click into the customer’s details page and select Actions > Delete customer.

Available properties and uses

The Customer resource has many useful properties you can set to customise billing. This section explains the properties you can store on the Customer, and the effects of each.

Customer profile

A basic customer profile is useful for invoice and receipt generation, and can generally act as a lightweight customer relationship management system (CRM) for your application. You can also use Stripe Apps for affiliates and referrals to set up and manage referral and affiliate programmes with Stripe, get customer information, and automate commission adjustments from the Stripe Dashboard.

Minimal customer profile

When creating a customer, set these properties:

Email address
Customer name
Metadata with a reference to the internal customer ID of your application

An email address lets Stripe notify the customer of failed payments or when completing a payment requires further action, as part of the Automatic Collection process.

Store the internal customer ID of your application in the metadata attribute. Like most Stripe resources, the Customer resource includes a Metadata object hash to flexibly store contextual key-value information. To aid in auditing and support, store your internal customer ID as a key-value pair on the Customer resource. This allows you to search for the customer using your internal reference ID. Conversely, we recommend storing Stripe customer IDs against the internal customer model of your application.

Billing and shipping addresses

Use the address properties to set an address for billing (invoicing, credit notes, and so on), and a shipping address (for physical goods).

While a shipping address is most relevant to businesses delivering physical goods, a billing address is useful because it displays on invoices, credit notes, and receipts—a common requirement for tax compliance.

Email and PDF language localization

Localise Stripe-generated emails and PDFs by setting the preferred_locales property. This property accepts an ordered list of preferred languages, sorted by preference. These preferred locale values are based on RFC-4646. Examples include “en” for English, or “fr-CA” for Canadian French. See the Customising invoices page for more information.

Per-customer invoice settings

For further details on customising invoice contents on a per-customer basis, see the Customising invoices page. It explains custom fields, invoice footer content, and how to customise the invoice number.

Payment

All payments are collected from payment details associated with a customer, and a customer can have multiple ways to make a payment, including:

Payment Methods
Customer Credit Balance

Customers are single-currency, meaning after you’ve assigned a currency, invoiced the customer, or set a customer credit balance, you can’t change the currency. This locked state is visible in the Dashboard in a disabled Currency dropdown.

If you need to bill a single entity with multiple currencies, create a new customer for each currency.

Invoicing

All invoicing-related resources are associated with the customer being billed. These resources include:

Tax info

To meet tax jurisdiction requirements, you might need to include customer tax ID numbers and other information on invoices. It’s ultimately your responsibility to make sure your customer’s invoices contain the correct information. This includes tax IDs, tax exemption status, and addresses.

Tax IDs provide a way to store and render one or more tax ID numbers on invoices. Tax exemption status indicates whether the entity is taxable. By default, a customer’s tax_exempt status is set to none, meaning it’s a taxable billing entity. However, you can flag a customer as being responsible for paying the tax on an invoice by setting the tax_exempt property to reverse, or flag them as being tax exempt by setting the status to exempt. You can read more about using tax_exempt and reverse on the Tax Rates page.

Common tasks

This section explains some of the common tasks you might perform with the Customer resource.

Create a subscription

Before you can create a new subscription, you need to create a customer for billing purposes.

Create the customer.
Define your product catalogue and prices.
Create a subscription using the customer created in step one and a price (or multiple prices) from step two.

You can continue to update the customer’s details after you create the subscription until an invoice is finalised. Any changes apply to the next billing cycle, when a new invoice is generated using the latest state of the customer when rendering PDFs, emails, and the hosted invoice page. Read the How subscriptions work page for more detailed information.

Send a one-off (manual) invoice to a customer

Unlike subscription invoices, you manually issue one-off invoices and they don’t follow an automated schedule. This makes them useful for billing one-off orders or work, such as setup and installation fees, consultancy fees, or single orders for physical goods.

Create the customer.
Create a new draft invoice by adding invoice line items with a description, quantity, unit price, and tax rate.
Set the invoice payment method. You can collect payment for an invoice either by automatically charging the payment method on file, or by emailing the invoice to the customer.
Finalize the invoice.

See the one-off invoices documentation for full details on how to create and collect payment for one-off invoices.

Store a customer credit balance

The customer credit balance feature allows you to assign credit and debit adjustments to a specific customer. The resulting balance is applied to future invoices for that customer.

Add and validate tax ID numbers

Displaying a customer’s tax ID on invoice documents is a common requirement. With Stripe, you can add one or multiple tax IDs to a customer. A customer’s tax IDs are displayed in the header of invoice and credit note PDFs. See the Tax IDs page for more details.

Add a coupon to a customer

A coupon contains information about a percent-off or amount-off discount. Stripe Billing allows you to associate a coupon with a customer, resulting in a discount for all invoices billed.

Creating an invoice—either manually or when generated by a subscription—uses the coupon by applying a corresponding discount to the invoice amount due, subtracted from the pre-tax amount. You can view this information in the invoice footer summary table.

Set the currency for a customer

The currency property is a three-letter ISO code for the currency that you charge the customer in for recurring billing purposes. You can set the currency in the Dashboard by navigating to the Customers > Details page and clicking Update details. After you set the currency, you can’t change it. Creating an invoice or credit balance for the customer also permanently sets the customer’s currency.