Email receipts and paid invoices

You can manually or automatically send customized email receipts or paid invoices. Learn more about receipts for payments.

Automatically send receipts

To enable automated receipts, toggle Successful payments on in your Customer emails settings. Receipts are only sent when a successful payment has been made—no receipt is sent if the payment fails or is declined.

Customize receipts

Alter the appearance and functionality of your receipts with the following customization options:

• Branding: Modify the logo and colors in your Branding settings. The upper limit for a custom logo image file size is 512KB. Ideally, the logo should be a square image exceeding 128 x 128 pixels. JPG, PNG, and GIF file types are supported.
• Public information: Specify the public information you want to include, such as your contact number or website address, in your Public details settings.

To display custom text, use the payment_intent_data.description attribute on the Checkout Session. Some examples include:

• Description of goods or services provided
• Authorization code
• Subscription information
• Cancellation policies

You can see a real-time preview of your email receipt on your Dashboard Branding settings page. To send a test receipt, hover over the preview image and click Send test receipt, then enter your email address.

Automatically send paid invoices

In addition to ordinary receipts, Checkout can generate paid invoices as proof of payment. Invoices have more information than receipts. For subscriptions, Stripe generates invoices automatically, but for one-time payments, you need to enable them.

To generate invoices, first, in your Customer emails settings, under Email customers about, select Successful payments. Then, when creating a Checkout session, set invoice_creation[enabled] to true.

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 \
  --data-urlencode success_url="https://example.com" \
  --data-urlencode cancel_url="https://example.com"

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

The downloadable invoice PDF

The downloadable invoice receipt

The customer email with links to the invoice PDF and receipt

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

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

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 \
  --data-urlencode success_url="https://example.com" \
  --data-urlencode 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.

Localization

When using Checkout Sessions, the language of the receipt and invoice is determined by several factors:

• If a Customer is set, their preferred locale are used if available.
• If a Customer is set without any preferred locales, the language setting from the Stripe Dashboard is applied.
• If no Customer is set, the language defaults to the browser locale of the user opening the Checkout Session URL.