Stripe

What it is

An agent connected to Stripe can answer your customers’ billing questions and keep your billing in order: it looks up payments, invoices and subscriptions, refunds payments, sends invoices and payment links, and follows up when a payment fails or a customer disputes one.

It connects with a key you create for it in Stripe. The key decides what the agent may do there, so you choose, area by area, what it can see and what it can change.

Before you start

You need a Stripe account role that may create keys: Administrator or Developer. To try it out first, use a Stripe sandbox, which holds only test data, and connect your live account later.

Connecting Stripe

1. In Stripe, open Developers, then API keys, and click Create restricted key.
2. When Stripe asks how you’ll use the key, choose Authorizing agent access to your account. Stripe then knows the key belongs to an AI agent and holds sensitive actions, like refunds and cancellations, for a person’s approval in Stripe too.
3. Name the key after the agent and set its permissions (see the list below). Create it and copy it: Stripe shows a new key only once.
4. In AgentTeams, open the agent, go to the Tools tab, choose Stripe and paste the key. The wizard checks it with Stripe, shows what the agent can see, and switches on the default reactions.

What the agent can do

• Payments and refunds. Find a customer’s payments, see why a card was declined, and refund a payment in full or in part.
• Customers. Look up customers by email or name, add new ones and update their details.
• Invoices. See what’s open, paid or overdue, draft an invoice from a few lines, send it, send a reminder, and void one sent by mistake.
• Subscriptions. See what a customer pays for and until when, cancel at the end of the paid period or right away, pause collecting payment, and undo a cancellation.
• Disputes. Gather what speaks for you and save it on the dispute before the bank’s deadline, for a person to check and submit.
• Payment links. Create a link the customer pays through, to send in an email or a chat.
• Reports. Add up payments, refunds, fees and disputes for any period, and list payouts to your bank.

Some things stay with a person in Stripe, whatever the key allows: the agent never pays out money, never moves money to other accounts, never charges a card outside an invoice, and never changes your account’s settings.

The key’s permissions

Set these to Write, so the agent can do the work above:

• Charges and Refunds, to see payments and refund them.
• Customers, to look up, add and update customers.
• Invoices, to draft, send and void invoices.
• Subscriptions, to cancel, pause or resume them.
• Payment Disputes, to save evidence on a dispute.
• Payment Links, Prices and Products, to create payment links.
• Webhook Endpoints, so Stripe tells the agent when something happens (see the reactions below).

Set these to Read: Balance, Payouts, Payment Intents, Events and Accounts. Everything else can stay at None.

Leave out what the agent shouldn’t do. With Charges and Refunds set to Read instead of Write, for example, it sees payments but can never refund one. You can change a key’s permissions in Stripe at any time.

What it reacts to

Two reactions are on from the start: a payment fails (the agent checks why and drafts a friendly note with the link where the customer can pay) and a customer disputes a payment (the agent gathers the evidence and tells your team the deadline). On the Tasks page you can also switch on reactions to paid invoices, overdue invoices, new purchases, new subscriptions, subscriptions set to cancel, ended subscriptions and trials ending soon.

The agent never reacts to a change it made itself, so cancelling a subscription doesn’t send it its own cancellation. See Reactions for filters and custom instructions.

Staying in control

Every change the agent wants to make in Stripe goes through a review step first, and your company’s rules decide which changes need a person to approve them; anything that reaches a customer waits for approval by default. Approval gates explains how.

Stripe adds a second check for keys made for agents: refunds and cancellations wait in Stripe until a reviewer approves them (Settings, then Approvals). Until then the agent tells you the action is waiting, never that it’s done.

What we receive, and what we keep

• Stripe tells us when payments, invoices, disputes and subscriptions change, once for your whole team. We keep only the events an employee has a reaction for; the rest are dropped straight away.
• The key is stored encrypted and used only for the agent’s work in your Stripe account.
• What the agent reads and does stays with that agent in your own AgentTeams workspace, the same way its chats and emails do. Nothing from Stripe is used to train any model. For the full picture, see our privacy policy.

Disconnecting

There are two places, and doing both is the clean way round:

1. In AgentTeams. Open the agent, go to the Tools tab, open the Stripe card and click Disconnect. The agent stops working in Stripe at once, and when no other agent of yours uses the same account, Stripe stops sending us events.
2. In Stripe. Open Developers, then API keys, find the agent’s key, open its menu and choose Expire key. Stripe gives apps no way to end a key themselves, so this is the step that ends it in Stripe.

If something is off

• The key isn’t accepted. Check that you copied the restricted key (it starts with rk_live_, or rk_test_ for test data), not the publishable one. A live key can’t be shown again in Stripe; create a new one.
• The agent says it isn’t allowed to do something. The key lacks that permission. Edit the key in Stripe and add it; no reconnect is needed.
• The reactions never start. The key needs Webhook Endpoints set to Write. Add it in Stripe, then connect again.
• A refund or cancellation is still waiting. Stripe holds it for a reviewer: approve it in Stripe under Settings, Approvals.

Related

• AI agents for Stripe: what teams use it for
• Reactions: filters and custom instructions
• Approval gates: who approves what