Automating Stripe Invoices: Generate PDFs, Store in S3, and Sync to Google Sheets with n8n

Read the full guide et download the JSON here

Handling invoices manually after every successful Stripe payment is a tedious bottleneck. While Stripe handles payment processing and basic receipts, businesses often need standardized, itemized PDF invoices for accounting and client archiving.
If you want to eliminate manual invoice creation entirely, this open-source n8n workflow automates the entire pipeline: from catching successful Stripe payments and formatting zero-decimal currencies to generating PDF invoices, archiving them to Amazon S3, emailing clients via Gmail, and logging transactions into a Google Sheets ledger.

🛠️ The Architecture & Tech Stack

This end-to-end automation orchestrates multiple platforms without relying on expensive, paid SaaS invoicing tools:

• Trigger: Stripe Webhook (payment_intent.succeeded)
• Core Logic & Transformation: n8n Workflow Engine (with custom JavaScript data processing)
• PDF Generation: PDFops Community Node
• File Storage: Amazon S3 Bucket
• Communication & Notification: Gmail (for client delivery) & Slack (for debugging/alerting)
• Accounting Ledger: Google Sheets

⚙️ How the Workflow Operates (Step-by-Step)

1. Stripe Event Catching: The workflow listens for successful payment intents, ignoring zero-value or invalid test events.
2. Customer Lookup: It queries the Stripe API to fetch clean client details (name and email).
3. Currency & Tax Handling: It normalizes monetary amounts—accounting for standard decimal currencies (like USD, where amounts are stored in cents) and zero-decimal currencies (like JPY). If a tax rate is defined, it reverses the math to calculate net, tax, and total breakdown values accurately.
4. PDF Rendering: The normalized payload is sent to the PDFops community node to build a clean invoice document.
5. Storage & Archiving: The resulting PDF binary is automatically uploaded to an Amazon S3 bucket for long-term secure retention.
6. Logging & Notification: A new entry is appended to a Google Sheets transaction tracker, the PDF is emailed directly to the customer via Gmail, and any API or missing-email failures are instantly posted to a dedicated Slack channel.

⚠️ Key Trade-Offs & Production Considerations

Before deploying this to production, keep these operational details in mind:

• Duplicate Protection: The workflow triggers on all incoming successful payments. Ensure your Stripe event filters or accounting logic prevent duplicate runs if you already use Stripe's native invoice system.
• Error Handling: While failures during data shaping or PDF generation post alerts to Slack, ensure your S3 and Gmail nodes include fallback handling to prevent silent pipeline drop-offs.
• Legal Compliance: Simple auto-generated PDFs may require adjustments (such as sequential numbering, tax ID numbers, and physical business addresses) to fully comply with local tax laws.

🚀 Get the Workflow JSON

You can download the full workflow structure and JSON setup guide directly from the original publication:

👉 Read the full guide and get the workflow JSON on LeenLabs

Have you built custom billing pipelines with n8n? Let’s discuss your architecture choices or improvements in the comments below!