Invoice

An invoice is an itemized statement of what a customer owes for a given billing period, listing the charges, taxes, discounts, and the total due. In a subscription business, invoices are generated automatically each cycle and are the record Stripe uses to collect payment.

How invoices work in Stripe

For a subscription, Stripe creates an invoice at the start of each billing cycle. The invoice pulls in line items from the subscription's prices and any one-off invoice items, applies discounts and tax, and produces a total.

An invoice moves through a lifecycle:

1. draft — being assembled; still editable.
2. open — finalized and awaiting payment.
3. paid — collected successfully, which fires the invoice.paid event.
4. uncollectible or void — written off, or canceled before payment.

Why the events matter

The invoice.paid event is the reliable signal that revenue for a period has actually been collected — not just billed. invoice.payment_failed fires when collection fails, kicking off retries and dunning. If a finalized invoice needs to be reduced afterward, you don't edit it — you issue a credit note against it.

Invoices and ChargeBell

ChargeBell can post a Slack alert when an invoice is paid, keyed off Stripe's invoice.paid event. That alert type ships off by default — many teams prefer the payment-received alert instead — but you can turn it on and route it to any channel. As always, ChargeBell reads these events read-only; Stripe generates and collects every invoice.