Sending e-invoices to your customer's accounts payable

With business customers, the person who orders is rarely the person who books invoices. Many companies have a dedicated inbox for that, often one that reads e-invoices automatically. That is where the XRechnung should arrive.

Who gets the email

For each Stripe invoice, BelegDock sends an email with the Stripe PDF, the XRechnung and the link to Stripe's payment page. The recipient is:

1. the address in the invoice's invoice_email metadata, if set;
2. otherwise the address in the Stripe customer's invoice_email metadata;
3. otherwise the email address on the Stripe invoice.

The invoice_cc metadata adds further recipients in copy, again on the invoice or on the customer. Separate several addresses with commas or semicolons, at most five per field. If an address is invalid, BelegDock sends nothing and names the field concerned.

For most customers it is enough to set both once on the customer, for example invoice_email = ap@customer.example and invoice_cc = purchasing@customer.example. The invoice metadata is only needed for exceptions.

Why not Stripe's own fields

In the Stripe Dashboard you can enter a billing email and CC addresses on a customer. These fields exist only in the Dashboard: Stripe does not expose them through its API, so no app can read them, BelegDock included. Hence the metadata.

Which language

You write the email template in BelegDock in German and can translate it into English, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Polish. Each email goes out in the Stripe customer's first preferred language that has a translation. If none matches, customers outside Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein get the English version, if there is one, and everyone else the German one. New workspaces start with an English translation.

Stripe sets the language of the Stripe PDF itself, also from the customer's preferred language. The XRechnung holds structured data; texts such as line descriptions appear as they are in Stripe.

Avoiding duplicate emails

If Stripe sends the invoice itself and BelegDock sends it too, your customer gets two emails for the same invoice, albeit with the same number. Check Stripe's customer email settings: turn off sending finalized invoices if BelegDock takes it over, and keep notices about failed payments and authentication on. Do not turn off automatic invoice advancement for this, because Stripe then stops collecting payments too.

Sources

• Customer emails, customizing invoices and customer language and metadata (Stripe)
• Automatic invoice advancement (Stripe)

This page is a summary, not tax or legal advice.