Orb's pre-purchase ledger is used to support burn-down use cases, where each event depletes a credit or real-currency balance; after a customer's balance is completely depleted, charges begin to accrue on the upcoming invoice.

Previously, Orb's pre-purchase system supported "simple" unit prices, where each event could be priced independently of others (such as $0.003 per event). As of today, Orb supports the large majority of pricing models in the pre-purchase ledger — as long as more usage for your model always means a higher deduction rate, the pre-purchase ledger can now track it! This is true of all default pricing models in Orb except for bulk pricing, where new events can lead to a lower overall deduction amount.

To learn more about configuring prepaid credits, check out the docs here.

In addition to invoice edits being available through the Orb web application, you can now programmatically add one-off fees to draft invoices via the API by creating an invoice line item attached to the invoice.

Consider using this feature to programmatically enrich invoices with passthrough fees, support costs that are tracked elsewhere, or even late penalty fees for non-payment.

Orb supports a sophisticated pre-purchase ledger with automatic event-level deduction tracking, expiry, and the ability to take fine-grained actions on credit blocks.

Starting today, blocks may be effective as of a future date, allowing you to represent future purchases. Use this functionality to load in a credit purchase as soon as the contract is signed, while still reflecting the correct effective date of the contracts. 

This also helps you achieve more accurate financial reporting behavior: blocks that are effective at a future date are booked revenue as of their effective date, and the resulting revenue will be deferred only after that date.

An Orb customer's balance can now be increased or decreased via the API, mirroring the same behavior as the webapp (docs).

Our plans and billable metric pages have been redesigned!

Billable Metrics

The billable metrics list page now has a graph that breaks down the revenue of your top billable metrics in the past 30 days, and the metrics are now displayed in a list with searching and pagination.

Clicking into a metric shows a new layout for viewing the details of the metric, a timeline, and all of the plans that use this metric.

Plans

The plans page shows a graph that has breakdown of the revenue by plan for a particular month. Hover over a bar to see the top grossing plans in the month, and the plans are now displayed in a list with searching and pagination.

Clicking into a plan shows a new layout for viewing the details of the plan, a timeline, all of the subscriptions that use this plan, and all of the alerts for this plan.

If you are viewing a plan that has been overridden during subscription creation, the properties that have been changed from the parent plan will be highlighted in yellow.

We've made several changes to the Orb home page to provide actionable information at a glance.

1. New visualizations of revenue broken down by plan and billable metric
2. An additional widget showing recently created subscriptions, grouped by plan
3. Instead of a top grossing customers widget, we've added failed and past due invoices widget in order to better track your outstanding receivables

Coupons are now available to use in Orb! 

• A coupon represents a reusable discount configuration, with a redemption code that can be issued to end-users, such as FIFTYOFF to represent a potential 50% discount. Coupons can be configured for a specific percent or amount discount.
• The coupon's redemption code can be provided at subscription start or plan change, to be redeemed for the matching discount. 
• Coupons can be configured to limit the number of redemptions, as well as the duration the discount will apply for.
• On Orb's invoices, the coupon redemption code will show as attribution for the resulting discount.

Check out our docs to find out more, and reach out to Orb to enable coupons for your account.

Plans in Orb can now be configured with prices in a combination of custom credits and real-world currencies. The custom credits concept backs Orb's prepurchase ledger.

When configuring a plan, each price can be in either credits or the plan's invoicing currency. If the user subscribed to a mixed credits/currency plan and has pre-purchased credits, prices in credits will draw down from the pre-purchase balance, and any overage will be invoiced at the end of the billing period at the configured 'price per unit' rate for credits.

Learn more about working with prepaid balance in Orb's docs.

The view subscription usage API supports viewing grouped usage by a property for a non-decomposable metric if that property matches your invoice grouping setting. For example, if your metric calculates distinct active users, and your invoices are configured to group these by workspace ID, the usage API will also allow you to fetch active users per workspace programatically.

When cancelling a subscription, Orb now supports an effective date in the past, automatically handling the invoicing implications of this action including voiding and re-issuing invoices as required as well as handling the proration effects of the action.

This new functionality is helpful to handle scenarios in which the first payment for a subscription fails, and the subscription should be retroactively cancelled as of its start date. In these cases, we suggest programmatically cancelling the subscription as of the billing period start date. 

Read the docs to learn more about the different cancellation behaviors.