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Stripe invoice example for organizations

what's going on everybody Nick here in this video I'm going to run you through basically the stripe API from top to bottom or at least everything you need to know about the stripe API in order to send invoices watch payments and then use that to update either a CRM a spreadsheet some Financial dashboard or anything else you could possibly want this is a really common use case um I use it a lot in my own business and basically every client that I work with that uses stripe also eventually ends up asking me for some sort of system like this so hopefully this helps you this is something you've always wanted to improve on your ability to process and watch payments then this is a video for you stay tuned and let's get into it all right first up the stripe API can be pretty difficult to understand especially if you're a newcomer to it or you've never sent or received an invoice using the API before uh and this is both a good thing and a bad thing I mean it's a good thing because the reason why it's so intense is because it's um like extremely comprehensive and so it covers every possible use case you could ever want if you want to send or receive money on the internet and you want to do so with stripe um you know you're going to be able to do like any conceivable use case that's why all the SAS companies use stripe that's why all the e-commerce companies use stripe that's why the vast majority of like agencies like myself use stripe um it's just the gold standard and uh the potential of what you can do with it is is unreal but because of that they've had to make some weird changes I want to say to some of the concepts in their API to to make this accommodating and um like I'll abstract all the way all the complexity because I don't really think it matters that much but the the points that do matter for us are there are two objects in the API um that usually trip people up the first is the payment intent object versus the invoice object and so you know I'm not going to talk about this academically because we don't really care about the academics here we care about making money with it but um most people confuse these two and to to make it really simple an invoice is basically just a statement that somebody gets it has nothing to do with the the payment it just it's a statement that includes a link to a little payment form where somebody can fill out their payment info so that's what an invoice is a payment intent on the other hand is like a concept that's very unique to stripe that represents a transaction that goes through like physically somebody intends to pay you as then they put their credit card in the form they press the enter button or whatever that is a payment intent and so um invoices can generate payment intents if they're sent to the right customer and the customer wants to pay they they put in your info uh but a payment intent is not the same thing as an invoice and this is where a lot of people um sort of make missteps like I have a little scenario up in here if I just go over to stripe and then I do watch events and I don't know which one's which I'm just going to go add and I'll say um payment intent example if you like use the watch events module basically what you're doing is every time something in your stripe account happens you're going to receive a notification it's like a web hook driven flow um and you know if you want to receive a transaction every time a payment comes in which is very common this is probably like the number one most common reason why you want to use this thing um the group that you have to use is payment intent and what you're looking for specifically is payment intent succeeded and and all this means is that like the payment intent somebody put their credit card info they click enter that process actually succeeded and money was made into your money was put into your bank account um contrast that with like invoices you know an invoice being created deleted finalized marked on collectible even an invoice paid these are these are very different things than just like a transaction occurring in your stripe account because an invoice is a specific um like type of payment you can create a payment without creating an invoice an invoice is just one type of payment it refers to the statement that's sent out so for instance if you only wanted to track invoices that were paid and maybe not like recurring monthly subscriptions that don't have invoices you would use this endpoint but if you just wanted to track every payment that's ever happened ever then you would use the payment intent um uh you know endpoint and then you do payment intent succeeded so I'm just you know going to make a little Whimsical here I think I probably I think it's probably pretty simple at this point but you know if a payment intent is over here basically like when you send an invoice an invoice will generate a payment intent so you know if you think about it as you as a user up here I don't know what happened to my beautiful thing oh I must have done an outline so the user can generate an invoice and then the invoice is what generates the payment intent but at the same time the user can also just generate a payment intent immediately sort of aside from an invoice and this flow is perfectly fine too the issue is in order to generate the payment intent you need their card information because obviously you can't create the intent for them to pay if you don't have their card info um and that's usually most of the time why the invoice is handy because Stripes invoice functionality will automatically ask the customer to put in their payment information if you don't have it already uh which is quite useful for us so what I'm going to do in this video is you know now that we understand this concept generally uh and you don't need to know more than this trust me but now that we understand this concept generally I'm just going to use this in a real flow well an example flow that may be real uh that you can make real very easily where I have a CRM setup from a previous build I did called slack CRM and I'm just going to be tracking you know prospects coming through my Pipeline and then after the prospects make it to a stage called send invoice this is going to trigger a flow that goes into stripe and then creates an invoice for the amount over here and maybe I'll also change this field so that it says like service name maybe it'll be like my package name or something I don't know uh um yeah let's do package name uh and basically you know maybe while you're selling your product or service or whatever you are um marking down what package they want from you and so this is going to be like uh I don't know maybe they want like cold email system or something right for this for this amount over here and it'll just pull all the information directly from the clickup and that's what we what we use as the trigger to send the invoice you can use any platform you want you don't have to use clickup I'm just using clickup because I had it open literally just in front of me and I was like a crap I got to record this video let me just use clickup um so don't feel compelled to use click up you could use a Google sheet if you wanted you could just trigger this whole thing manually you know you got a lot of options okay so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to start with the clickup flow just to show you how I can get an event and actually um let's use web hooks for this this will be much better so um clickup allows you to send a web hook or send data to a web hook and I'll say um status equals send invoice so I'm going to copy this web hook address to my clipboard I'll go back here and what I want is I want this automations function and I want to add an automation they've just added this automate with AI feature which is pretty neat I find it doesn't work with custom Fields unfortunately but um I don't know when oh jeez I forget what this is called when stage is equal to when stage equals send invoice send web hook so yeah no it didn't work unfortunately classic AI t t why would anybody ever use AI so silly um what we need to do is go to custom Fields because this is a custom field and then I'll go stage and then stage is from any and then two I just want to send invoice and then what I want to do here is I want to send a web hook or call a web hook I'm pasting in the URL over here okay great I have this set up now so I'm going to go back over here I'm going to run this this is now just waiting oops sorry I didn't put the trigger on the right one make sure you move this little trigger I'm going to run this it's now waiting for that call I'm just going to pretend that this uh record just came in and I'm going to move it back to send invoice we just changed it to send invoice so it's passing through the clickup automation automation says hey if it send invoice um fire it off to this web hook and then it sends it we have a payload here with all the information that we need and then what we want specifically is um in this custom Fields array we have uh one of these here is what we want we got a lot of first names I remember when I made this video I made way too many first name fields um we have a mount that's what we're going to want but you know I'm looking at this I don't really like how this is spread into 12 different custom Fields I'm just going to say get a task um with custom Fields yeah I'll just say get a task what I'm going to do here is I got the web Hook from click up and inside there's a payload with an ID and a very simple way to like not have to deal with all that custom field is just to um actually let me test this I'm going to grab I'm going to copy the ID from the payload and then I'm just going to run this one specific module here um and we get the same task but if you scroll down to uh custom Fields uh right over here it actually just has the the name of the field so don't have to deal with like you know iterating through an array or whatever and so you see we got the data we need which is a package name and then amount we can use this to like generate an invoice pretty pretty easily but remember this is a test I'm just grabbing the data hardcoded here and eventually we're going to have to go back into the web hook and then pull in this ID field okay so I'm going to move this trigger here so I can just start everything there and then what we're going to do now is we're just going to go to stripe and we're actually going to get through we're going to get going with this um now as I mentioned previously you know the first thing that will pop up when you create is create a payment intent so you do not want to create a payment intent payment intent is a transaction and in order for the transaction to occur you know if I if I drag this over here it'll actually ask me for my customer ID it'll it'll ask me for um you know the person that I'm sending the payment intent to but we don't actually have a customer ID yet uh we need to create a customer ID anyway in stripe um if I do create an invoice down here um It'll ask for the customer ID as well as well uh and so I mean to be fair yeah I guess either way you're going to need a customer ID uh but what we're going to do is we're actually going to create a customer using the data inside of the um clickup task but a customer doesn't necessarily mean that they've paid you yet the customer like having a customer just means that somebody's information is in the system uh and that's that's what we're going to use to build out this customer ID thing you'll also see if we click on this create an invoice um field here there's a collection method that says send invoice or charge automatically and if we don't have the person's payment information yet we're going to have to um send the invoice so that they physically receive the statement and they can click through onto the payment form and I'll show you what all this looks like in a second but when they click through on the payment form It'll ask them for the credit card information and it'll do so in like a safe secure uh and pretty like pretty straightforward way there are a few additional fields that we can add here which I'm just going to point out before I move on um like the metadata field has keys and values this is really useful because you can pass this into an invoice and then you can later on let's say in like 2 months when somebody pays the invoice if for whatever reason the customers are paying with net 60 terms you can then watch the completion of the invoice and then you can get this metadata back so for instance you could say like click up or you know CU ID I think this is customer facing so you have to kind of like be a little sneaky about it and then you could feed in the task ID here and then when the payment goes through on the back end you know however long from now when you watch that task you could or when you watch the invoice you could grab the task ID you could check the clickup ID and then you could use it in your flow later to maybe update the clickup task with like the amount that they paid or something so you can do a lot here you could I don't know do like upsell items you could do a lot uh you could add your own custom Fields you could add a footer you could add a statement descriptor I'm not going to worry about the advance settings but I just wanted to run this through you guys in case you were unfamiliar okay so let's create an invoice what we actually need cuz I'm being silly is we need to create a customer so we're going to drag the create a customer module here you're going to have to do your stripe connection I've already done this um and then as you see what's really interesting about the Crea a customer is like technically it's not saying that anything's required you know in make.com any time a field is required it'll bold but uh in this case they're all just like plain text description email name phone but you do need to have an email address I believe if you don't have an email address you're going to have a bad time so what I want to do is I want to pull this data from my um custom Fields array here and I'm just going to add the email in I'm not going to add a description the name uh I should have a name field here crap I don't have a name field in the clickup I have so many first names but I didn't actually write one down oh wait a second I can just grab the name of the record what am I doing we'll just use task name okay so now that we've created a customer what we have to do is sort of counterintuitive um and this is a part of the stripe at least in make.com the process that trips a lot of people up now that we've created a customer you might think that we can just go to create invoice immediately and this is what I personally thought um when I was starting with the the stripe invoice sorry the stripe API as well you can't actually create an invoice right away what you have to do instead is you have to create an invoice item and then you have to sign that invoice item to the customer and then later when you create the invoice it'll just add up all of the invoice items so again this may seem a little bit weird but the real reason why it's happening uh is just to give people that are using the strap API developers substantially more freedom even if they don't necessarily you know if the flow isn't as simple um to understand or conceptualize um that all that complexity is hidden from the End customer and you end up just being able to do a lot more with it so um for currency I'm just going to type USD for amount I'm going to type 100 stripe will multiply or rather it'll divide any amount by 100 because they charge in cents they don't charge in dollarss so this is the integer amount in cents what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a a draft invoice for myself just for $1 um just to show you guys what the payment procedure or payment process looks like uh the description that I'm going to put in here is going to be the package name because that's what's going to show up on that line item then if I scroll down here um there's nothing else that I want you can do tack stuff too I've never really worried about attaching all this stuff I just get up and going um and then I I worry about it afterwards so we've not created the invoice item now what we have to do is we have to create an invoice so I'm going go over here create an invoice I'll attach that to the end of the create an invoice module and then we will select the customer ID that we had from our previous module here the collection method we're going to have to use is send invoice the reason why we're going to have to do that is because we don't actually have the customer payment information yet we only have um their email address and so what we're going to need to do is we're going to have to send over a request that has a little payment form with credit card information and a bunch of other things that we asking I alluded to the address earlier um the next thing is we're going to have to put the number of days until due or we'll have to put the due date this is sort of interesting but a lot of people like screw screw up with this because they um well I don't say I don't mean screw up but a lot of agencies that are just starting out they think that you need to provide like net 30 payment terms so they think that you know in order for this to seem legit you need to make the due date like a month out or two months out or whatever this is really silly you shouldn't do that if anything you should explicitly stick to like very short days until due and I'll usually just do two or three days the idea is you know when the customer gets an invoice um it's because I want them to pay it now I don't want them to look at it and be like ah I'm going to pay that in 30 days I don't want them to forget about it and then I have to like follow up with them religiously I'd rather just make it so that the invoice is just the really like this is the next step in whatever trans action that we're doing in my CRM you know um it's only after they pay the invoice that'll move them to close and actually begin the process nothing gets going until you know that invoice is is handled so that's personally what I do and I'd recommend you guys do not use Net 30 Terms or whatever in your agency um description you don't have to fill out the description no subscription ID no pending invoice items behavior um hold on a second yeah okay so I think we have to do include we'll give this a try together but anyway this will create the invoice so why don't we run through this we created the customer we then created the invoice item we then created the invoice so that's nice and then let's see if we got it in my mailbox here okay so I still didn't get it I think I might need to finalize it yeah okay so I have to finalize the draft invoice my bad um for the purpos of the demonstration I'm just going to grab the invoice ID that I just generated and I'm just going to tack this on to the end and I'm just going to run just this so finalize a draft invoice um we have the invoice PDF now so for instance we can actually like jump into the payment PDF sorry we can jump we get the the PDF here and this is what it looks like essentially the PDF that gets emailed you get the description of the item you get the unit price the quantity the amount and then you have a button where you can pay online which is pretty neat um we've received the invoice on the other end now um this is what it looks like new invoice from 1 second copy note this will take a couple of minutes um they need to obviously process the invoice on Stripes end they need to make sure that I guess things are legit but this is what it looks like when you get it in your inbox and if you go down to pay this invoice by open this in a new tab this is the experience that a customer has if they've never had to um you know pay your invoice before or if you don't have their credit card information I should say so as you see it says you know payment due June 9th 2024 due in two days to me you know 1 second copy invoice blah blah blah I always attach a memo is just a default that says thanks for your business um and then yeah we can we can go through and then we can fill the rest of this information but before I do that sorry this is the wrong workspace let's go back here before I do that I'm just going to go in and fix all of this so this is no longer using um test info it's using like real info just that when I save the blueprint for you guys it's um it's the right one the amount previously I just put $1 in and I'm actually going to pay the $1 I'll pay 30 cents of processing fees to show you guys what this looks like um we need to multiply this out as I mentioned earlier um by 100 because this is currently charging in sense so the $2,500 amount here would have actually only been like 25 uh so we need to bring that back up to $2,500 by multiplying it by 100 uh everything else here looks good so just doing some final checks create an invoice here that looks good that looks good awesome and then finalize a draft invoice right I just um copied in the ID so what I'll do is I'll just use this invoice ID field here so I'm going to save this let me call this click up status equals send invoice and then I'll say send stripe invoice that looks good to me let me just copy this really quickly and Export the blueprint save myself a bunch of time later and then what I want to do now is I want to show you guys how to watch payments and see when a payment goes through and then maybe do something with it so what I want to do is create another scenario here I'll say watch payment intent and I'll say update click up so what I'm going to do is I'll go to stripe again this time I'm using the watch payment events module I'm just going to add a new one here and I'll say test build watch payment event I really need to come up with a naming convention for this because I have so many things to say test build right now and then what we want is payment intent we're going to scroll down to payment intent succeeded save and then I'm going to click okay and what I'll do here is I'm going to go back into this is annoying because I didn't um put the the invoice metadata with the ID but I guess what I'll do is I'll go to click up I'm just going to grab the ID sorry I'm going to list tasks in a specific list and I'm going to filter them based off of the uh email address of the person on the record this will work just as well as what we're doing before but basically when a payment comes in I'm going to watch for that payment I'm going to grab the payment I'm going to get the customer ID that the payment was made with I'm then going to find the customer email it may just be under this customer field I don't entirely know but then once I have that I'm going to use that to search through clickup find the specific guy that just paid by his email address so in this case it'll say Nick or Nick left click. and then I'm just going to use it to update to Clos and that's what my workflow is is going to be like you know in this way you sort of have like a dynamic system but anyway what I have to do is I'm going to go to select the list what I want is in the 1 second copy workspace then I want the test build space then the folder is going to be folder lless list and then what I want is slack CRM this is my little tester ground I'm not going to worry about assigning ideas I'm not going to worry about any of the stuff um uh yeah and I guess I could go email is equal to custom field value I just don't know where the email is here there's so many fields I don't remember if it's in customer or if it's something else yeah I might uh I might just try customer for now we'll see if it doesn't work then I'm just going to hard code the data in and then I'll just update it afterwards so you guys all have the right web hook um number of tasks to return I only want one ideally I only want one with the custom field value set to the email so we'll give it a try anyway now I'm going to run this by running this I'm watching for payment intents on the account now I'm going to go back here to this link that I just opened and I'm going to pay using their link thing okay so I'm now paying and then what I'm going to do is go back to this web hook and you see awesome so we got the the information um but I was wrong that the customer field had the email yeah so it only has the ID so what we'll have to do then is I'll drag this over here and get the search customers filtered by criteria we actually don't need even need the search customers we need the get or let me see retrieve a customer there we go that's what we need and then I'm going to feed in the customer ID that we got from the watch events for my one whole dollar and I'll put that right there I'm just going to select all it'll just give me all the data oops I clicked cancel sorry I'm stopping the video here had enough of all of you okay so put the C customer here go okay and then once we retrieve the customer we're going to have access to their email address so then we can search by the presence of this email field that will return Nick left click. and then what we have to do is we have to go to click up and we have to update a task or edit a task with custom fields that one right here what we're going to do is we're going to grab the ID of the task that we just got from list all tasks and I have to go through this rigma roll again you know select the right space and that sort of deal so bear with me and then once we found the um specific task we're going to map this what we want is the task ID parameter we're not going to change a task name we're not going to change the content we're not going to change any of this stuff we're not even going to change the stage or uh status because that's not the field the field that I want is stage because I made a custom FAL for this it'll move this to closed there's also an amount paid um um column here that I added quite a while ago which we may be able to use at some point in part of the flow if you want and then yeah that looks good um I'm just going to test out the list all tasks here make sure that this works for my specific record nick. looks like it got the specific record um that I wanted I'm just not going to run it through from the beginning again because I don't want to create another payment but rest assured this is uh this works and then I'm going to pretend as if I got the payment I'm just passing the data through module so I have the task ID now I'm just going to edit the task with custom Fields I'll go back to my saxum and you see that it just automatically updated it to closed so in this way basically what we did is we started with um just a record that had you know maybe like an intake stage or like an empty stage and then when it was moved to send invoice we automatically sent an invoice to the person whose email is over here for the amount that is assist sit over here for a line item that is called whatever the package name is then uh however long it took them to pay doesn't matter when they did pay we ended up automatically catching that payment getting the customer ID then searching through our list here for somebody with the same email finding that email updating them to closed and then now that they're closed you can imagine how in any project management flow you could do a ton of stuff with this you could start the onboarding send them a quick onboarding email welcoming them and thanking them for the payment um sending them a calendar link to book an on a kickoff call there there's a lot obviously you can do behind the scenes you should also in my humble opinion be doing some sort of bookkeeping so every time a payment comes through you should be logging that to a Google sheet or something like that the value there is that you can later create a dashboard with this information and you know uh flesh out your your business finance tracking as well so I hope you guys enjoyed that video had a lot of fun putting it together the stripe uh payment intent versus invoice API can be kind of difficult if you're first getting started but I think that I simplified things as easily as humanly possible with that cute little Whimsical uh if you guys have any questions about this leave a comment down below otherwise like subscribe do that fun YouTube stuff I'll catch you on the next video thanks so much