Customer credit balance

Every customer in Stripe Billing has a credit balance that you can issue credit and debit adjustments against. Adjustments in the credit balance could be a credit (meaning you owe them money) or a debit (meaning they owe you money). These adjustments sum up to a balance on the customer that you can apply to future invoices.

Because the credit balance is computed from a ledger — an immutable list of debit and credit transactions — it provides an audit trail of transactions for the customer. These Customer Balance Transactions can refer to the object related to the adjustment (such as a Credit Note or Customer), or even metadata for your own reference.

Example use cases

Some common use cases for customer credit balances include:

• Issuing a Credit Note to create a credit that reduces the amount due on the next invoice.
• Prorations from downgrading a subscription can indirectly create credits to reduce the amount due on the next invoice.
• When the amount due on an invoice is less than the minimum chargeable amount the invoice is marked as paid and the amount owed moved to the credit balance as a debit. This functionality only occurs for customers without a cash_balance.

Customer credit balance details

Keep the following details in mind when using customer credit balances:

• The credit balance automatically applies toward the next invoice finalized to a customer.
• You can’t choose a specific invoice to apply the credit balance to.
• You can’t choose to not apply the credit balance to an invoice.
• The credit balance is in the customer’s currency.
• Customers with a cash balance can’t keep a positive balance. In other words, they can’t increase the amount due on the next invoice.
• The credit balance doesn’t apply to invoices created by Checkout Sessions with invoice_creation enabled.

Debits and credits

Negative values are treated as a credit (a reduction in the amount owed by the customer) that you can apply to the next invoice.

Positive values are treated as a debit (an increase in the amount owed by the customer to you) that you can apply to the next invoice.

Transactions

All modifications to the credit balance are recorded as Transactions. After it’s been created, you can only update its description or metadata—you can’t edit other properties or delete a transaction.

Undo a transaction

You can only undo it by creating a corresponding, reversing transaction. For example, if you credit the customer 10 USD you would have to debit the customer 10 USD in a new transaction, each canceling the other out.

Transaction types

All Transactions created with the API or in the Dashboard have a type value of adjustment, representing a debit or credit manually created by you for the customer.

The type property has many more possible values to represent the creation source and reason for the transaction. The following table outlines and describes each of these type values:

Modify the credit balance

You can modify a customer’s credit balance through the Dashboard by creating a new Customer Balance Transaction adjustment from the Customer’s detail page.

Scroll down to find the Invoice credit balance panel, and click Adjust balance to display the Credit balance adjustment modal.

From here you can set information about the adjustment, such as the Adjustment type (credit or debit), as well as a Currency (only available if the customer doesn’t have a currency set), Amount, and an internal note (visible to Dashboard users, but not the customer).

API

Create adjustments using the Customer Balance API, as shown in the following code example.

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/customers/cus_4fdAW5ftNQow1a/balance_transactions \
  -u "
sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
:" \
  -d amount=-500 \
  -d currency=usd

Credit balance transaction history

Audit a customer’s credit balance adjustments in the Dashboard by navigating to a Customer’s detail page and scrolling to the Invoice credit balance panel.

The Invoice credit balance panel displays the current value of the credit balance, and clicking View details shows you the transaction history used to calculate that value. Each transaction line displays information relevant to the transaction type, such as a link to the invoice that applied the credit balance, or the credit note that credited the balance.

API

Use the Customer Balance List API to retrieve a list of all transactions for a Customer.

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/customers/cus_4fdAW5ftNQow1a/balance_transactions \
  -u "
sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
:"

Customer cash balances

Customers using the bank transfers payment method have a cash balance object with one or more currencies in the available object. You can use the funds to make payments or pay invoices. Customers with available balances have the following behavior:

• You can’t create a negative customer cash balance since it represents money sent from the Customer.

• You can’t finalize a too-small or too-large invoice with the cash balance (for example, creating a subscription for 0.01 USD). Learn more about minimum and maximum amounts.

• You can delete Customers that have a cash balance, but only if their cash balance is 0.

• You can’t remove a Customer’s available balance.