Invoices

Invoices let you offer sales-assisted billing. This means that your sales team can draft and send invoices for products and services that you sell.

Invoices relate to customers, addresses, and businesses, as well as product entities.

Invoicing lifecycle

Using the API, you can:

• Create a draft invoice in Paddle.
• Issue an invoice, which sends it to the customer.
• Get a link to a PDF for an invoice.

You can’t update an invoice just yet, but we’re working on this. Use the Dashboard to make changes to a draft invoice.

Paddle handles payment reconciliation and marking invoices as paid for you, so there’s no need to worry about this.

Invoice items

Invoices work with product entities to say what you’re billing for. You can add a product_id and specify unit pricing in the items array.

In responses from the Paddle Invoice API, you’ll get a details object. This contains the totals for an invoice and its items after tax calculations.

The details object is read-only because Paddle calculates these totals for you. You should consider them the source of truth for totals on an invoice.

Checkout

You’ll generally create invoices for customers who are making a payment manually, like by wire transfer. Customers paying by invoice usually need to raise a PO and go through their accounts department.

For lower value invoices, you might like to let your customers pay by card. You can set billing_details.enable_checkout to true to get Paddle to generate a checkout link to pay online. You can get this link using the API, and it’s automatically included on your invoice document.

Invoice object

$ref: ../../reference/models/invoice.yaml

Work with invoices

Using the Paddle Invoice API, you can:

• List invoices
• Create a new draft invoice
• Get a single invoice
• Issue an invoice
• Get a PDF for an invoice
• Cancel an invoice

Update invoices

Invoices are always created with the status as draft. This means they don’t have an invoice_number and you can make changes to the invoice and its items.

When an invoice is issued, Paddle assigns an invoice_number and it’s considered a legal document. You can’t make changes to it at this point.

Cancel an invoice and create another if you need to make changes once issued.

Change invoice status

Unlike other entities, you can’t change the status of an invoice using a PATCH request. Paddle manages the status of an invoice for you.

To issue an invoice, changing its status from draft, use the issue an invoice method.

To cancel an invoice, changing its status to canceled, use the cancel an invoice method.

Cancel invoices

You can’t delete invoices, but you can cancel them to say you no longer need them.

To cancel an invoice, use the cancel invoice method.