Recurring Invoice

Overview

A recurring invoice is an invoice produced for each billing cycle under a schedule, contract, or measured-usage rule. Daily, monthly, annual, and usage-triggered generation are common. Every cycle creates a separate commercial obligation rather than reopening or overwriting the previous invoice.

The generation rule defines customer, plan or service, billing period, pricing version, currency, taxes, discounts, due date, and accepted payment routes. If the amount is denominated in fiat but payable in crypto, the invoice must also define when and how the exchange rate is locked. Changes to price or frequency should apply from an authorized effective date and remain auditable.

A recurring invoice differs from a recurring payment. The invoice requests value; it does not by itself authorize a wallet, custodial account, or provider to collect automatically. A customer can pay each cycle manually, grant a separate mandate, or use a reusable address with explicit attribution controls.

Each invoice retains its own issued amount, due amount, payment sessions, received transfers, fees, credits, refunds, and settlement state. Late payment after expiry should be matched to the original cycle and handled by policy, not credited automatically to the newest invoice. Duplicate generation and missed cycles require stable idempotency keys based on customer and billing period.

For crypto payments, operations should monitor quote expiry, wrong-asset transfers, network delays, underpayment, overpayment, and confirmations. Customer notices need the invoice identifier, covered period, amount, due date, payment status, and cancellation contact without exposing sensitive wallet information.

A subscription invoice is a common subtype tied to a subscription relationship. Recurring invoices can also arise from rent, retainers, usage, installments, or other repeated obligations with no product subscription.