▲ ▼ GST compliant invoice for stripe
Stripe supports outstanding invoice, i.e. statements of amounts owed by the customer and receipts after payment. But in India's GST regime, tax invoices are to be provided after delivering the service i.e. after payment and has very specific rules for how the invoice should be.
- Stripe's invoice is not compliant with the India's GST invoice regulations(lack of required fields), Forcing me to generate my own invoice; Which is fine for the SaaS products where I have back-end to process the invoice but on services where there's no back-end e.g. static websites I have to generate the invoice manually.
- I have a separate Stripe account for each product/service for convenience under single GST registration which requires the invoice number across accounts to be in same sequence but is not possible with Stripe.
These are some of the major need-gaps I have noticed with Stripe's invoicing service in India, It may or may not be applicable to GST regimes of other countries. Companies with revenue over 50 crores (500 million) can use Govt's E-Invoicing API and so this need-gap affects only small businesses and indies.
One way to think of this is stripe is a payment gateway only, and they are sticking to that particular problem. Invoicing is something that should happen at storefront (ecommerce) or software (saas) level. So what you are proposing is invoicing api, which ideally should not connect to stripe but to place where transaction is getting initiated (storefront or saas software)
Stripe Invoice is a paid feature - https://stripe.com/en-in/invoicing and Stripe is not just a payment gateway as they've become a complete payment ecosystem albeit with several quirks and without feature parity across countries.