Invoices

Invoices represent the amount a customer owes for a subscription. Elastic Path Subscriptions generates an invoice for every period in a subscription billing cycle. Invoices provide:

• an itemized list of goods and services provided by a subscription.
• the cost of a subscription.
• if applicable, any taxes.

The invoice lifecycle is described below.

1. When a subscription is created, an invoice for the first billing period is created. When a subscription is created as part of an order, the payment for the order covers the first billing period.
2. Subscription invoices are created by billing runs. The billing run identifies subscriptions that require a new invoice for their next billing period and creates them. At this point, invoices are marked as outstanding.
3. Invoices where tax_required is true will not have payment taken until a tax run has added the required tax to the invoice.
4. The payment run identifies invoices that are still outstanding and attempts to take payment for them. If the payment succeeds the the invoice is no longer outstanding. If the payment fails for any reason, then the invoice remains outstanding and is picked up by the next payment run to retry the payment. If an invoice has a failed payment, payment is only retried if the fixed interval has passed from the last payment attempt as defined in Settings.

Payment Retries

It is important to limit the number of times Subscriptions retries a failed payment request for many reasons, including: frequent payment retries can indicate fraudulent activities; multiple failed payment attempts can lead to customers accounts being locked out or flagged for suspicious activity resulting in poor customer experience; and excessive retries places an unnecessary load on your payment processing system.

In Subscriptions, by default, the number of payment retries is 10. You can set this to a limit between 0 - 20, depending on your requirements. Each payment retry is made as a payment run.

Once the number of payment retries reaches the limit, the payment retries stop, resulting in status of the invoice being unpaid. See Invoices.

When configuring payment retries, you have the following options.

Attribute	Required	Description
payment_retry_type	Optional	One of the following options: fixed - use fixed if you want a fixed time interval between payment retries. backoff - use backoff if you want the time between retry attempts to increase exponentially. tiered - use tiered if you want to specify a list of time durations.
payment_retry_interval	Optional	Represents the retry interval. For example, if payment_retry_unit is week and payment_retry_interval is 1 then, the payment retry interval is 1 week.
payment_retry_multiplier	Optional	Use when payment_retry_type is tiered and represents the factor by which the time duration increases after each retry.
payment_retry_unit	Optional	Represents the unit of time, either day or week.

Rounding

Subscriptions always rounds down to the penny.

Tax

Subscriptions allows you to apply any number of tax rates to your invoices and subscriptions. When applying a tax rate, you must specify:

• a name that appears on your customer's invoice that describes the specific type of tax.
• the tax rate which is the percentage of the subscription amount that is required to be paid as tax.

In addition, you can optionally specify the jurisdiction which is the geographic area or political entity that has authority to levey and collect taxes.

You can apply more than one tax rate for all items in an invoice. You cannot apply a tax rate per line item.

Payments

When your customers add a subscription to a cart and the cart is checked out, an unpaid order is returned. You can process the payment for the order though a payment gateway. You can do this using:

• Elastic Path Payments Powered by Stripe. The Elastic Path Payments Powered by Stripe gateway interacts with Stripe to allow your subscribers to pay for their subscriptions.
• Authorize.Net.

Using Elastic Path Payments Powered by Stripe

To use Elastic Path Payments Powered by Stripe gateway, contact the Customer Success Team.

Create your Stripe account in Stripe Dashboard and complete an onboarding form to make payments using the gateway. For more information, see Onboarding.

Once you have signed up for Elastic Path Payments Powered by Stripe, you must configure the payment gateway so that your shoppers can make payments. See Configure Elastic Path Payments Powered by Stripe.

Using Authorize.Net

To use Authorize.Net, you must have:

• an active merchant account with Authorize.Net
• obtained API credentials. These include an API Login ID and a Transaction Key.
• Enabled Authorize.Net in Commerce Manager. See Enabling Authorize.net.

Payment Requests

Subscriptions only supports the purchase payment mechanism. The gateway attempts to charge the customer immediately, and the result of the attempt is returned. If a payment fails, the invoice is kept as outstanding and the payment information, with the reason for the failure is attached to the invoice. A new payment run is required to attempt another payment.

When sending a payment request to the Payments service, you must specify the following.

Attribute	Required	Description
gateway	Required	Either elastic_path_payments_stripe or authorize_net.
method	Required	Must be purchase.
payment	Required	The type of payment, for example, pm_card_visa_debit.
options	Required	These options must be set as they set up the card to be used in future without the customer being present. If these options are not set, future payments may fail. There are two options. off_session. Must be set to true. confirm. Must be set to true.

📄️ List invoices

Retrieves a list of all invoices.

📄️ Get invoice

Get invoice

📄️ List invoice payments

List invoice payments

📄️ Get invoice payment

Get invoice payment