---
title: "Delete a customer of a company"
method: DELETE
path: "/v1/companies/{company_id}/customers/{customer_id}"
tags: ["CompanyCustomers"]
---

# Delete a customer of a company

`DELETE /v1/companies/{company_id}/customers/{customer_id}`

## Request

- Base URL: `https://app.beel.es/api`
- URL: `https://app.beel.es/api/v1/companies/{company_id}/customers/{customer_id}`
- Auth: HTTP bearer

Deletes a customer of this company that has no invoices.

- **What deleting means:** the customer is retained internally for tax record-keeping
  purposes, but is no longer exposed by the API: subsequent requests to it return `404`, and
  it is never included in the customer list, under any value of the `active` filter.
- **Identifier released:** its NIF or alternative identifier is freed, so a new customer may
  be created with the same identifier.
- **Customers with invoices:** they cannot be deleted and the request answers `409`
  `CLIENT_HAS_INVOICES`. To stop using a customer, update it with `active` set to `false`
  instead of deleting it.
- **Customers used by a recurring invoice:** while an active or paused recurring invoice
  has the customer as its recipient, the request answers `400`
  `REFERENCED_BY_RECURRING_INVOICE`.

## Response `204`

Customer deleted. No body — there is nothing to report that the request itself does not already imply.

## Other responses

- `400`: An active or paused recurring invoice uses this customer as its recipient (`REFERENCED_BY_RECURRING_INVOICE`). The customer is left untouched. End that recurring invoice or change its customer first.
- `401`: Missing or invalid authentication. Like every other error, `message`/`detail` is localized according to `Accept-Language` (`es`, `en`, `ca`); defaults to English when the header is missing or asks for none of those.
- `403`: Your account does not own or manage this company, or does not hold the required access over it. A NIF that does not exist answers the same way. That case answers `error.code` `ACTIVE_COMPANY_NOT_ACCESSIBLE`.
- `404`: There is no such customer in this company. It never refers to the NIF in the path: a NIF you cannot reach answers `403`.
- `409`: The customer has invoices (`CLIENT_HAS_INVOICES`). The customer is left untouched — it is neither deleted nor deactivated.
- `429`: Rate limit exceeded. `RATE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED` when the request rate of your credential is over its limit; `TOO_MANY_REQUESTS` when an email the operation sends is held back because too many went out to that recipient in a short time. Either way, retry after the `Retry-After` seconds. `QUOTA_EXCEEDED` is the other `429`: the operation would go over a quota of your plan for the current period (issued invoices, for instance). Retrying does not help until the quota resets or the plan changes. `error.details` carries `feature_code`, `current_usage`, `quota_limit` and `reset_date`, and `RateLimit-Reset` the seconds until the reset when it is known.
- `500`: Internal server error
- `default`: Any status code the operation does not list above. Every operation declares it, so a generated client always has a branch to fall into and never loses the cause of a failure it did not anticipate. This is where the transport-level answers land — `405`, `406`, `415` and `429` — together with any status a future version of the API starts returning. All of them carry the same error envelope as the codes listed explicitly, so `error.code` is what tells them apart: switching on the status code alone is not enough. See «Transport-level errors» in the API description for when each one is produced. A `402` carrying `SUBSCRIPTION_REQUIRED` lands here when the account has no active subscription. `error.details` says why and what to do: `current_status` (absent if it never had one), `required_permission` and `action`. A `503` carrying `SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE` lands here too, with a `Retry-After` header: a dependency of BeeL itself (the database, the email provider) was momentarily unavailable and nothing was done. Retry after those seconds. A `502` carrying `EXTERNAL_SERVICE_ERROR` also lands here: an outbound integration the operation depends on failed or did not answer in time. It is a transient condition — retry with the same `Idempotency-Key` where the operation accepts one. One exception to the envelope: a failure of the network edge that never reaches the application (`502`, `503`, `504`, `524`) is generated by Cloudflare and its body is not BeeL's — it may not even be JSON. Treat those as "no answer", and retry.

---

[API](https://skmtc.dev/beel/apis/beel-public-api.md) · [All operations](https://skmtc.dev/beel/apis/beel-public-api/llms.txt) · [OpenAPI document](https://skmtc.dev/beel/apis/beel-public-api/revisions/ffbc0ae31f79?raw)