The new Orb customer portal is now available.

With the customer portal, your customers have a central place where they can view their full invoice history.

Customers can also get a glimpse of their consumption rate for the current billing cycle. Any invoices that require action are automatically surfaced to customers, to help improve collections.

Customers can pay their invoices directly, just as they have been able to with Orb Invoices.

To provide access to the portal for your customers, visit the internal customer view and click the three-dot menu at the top of the page or use Orb's get customer API endpoint.

You can read about sharing invoices and the customer portal in our docs here.

Orb has updated how our invoice line items appear.

The new design makes it easier for your customers to understand usage levels and price calculations.

Instead of breaking down the line items like this:

customers will now see them as pictured here:

The flow to create billable metrics has been updated to make customization easier. You can now convert your partially built drag and drop billable metric into custom SQL.

This change allows you to take advantage of the ease of building a billable metric with the drag and drop UI and the power of custom SQL.

We've optimized Orb's event ingestion pipeline to make your events visible in Orb faster after initial ingestion. Previously, with high throughput workloads, the most significant contributor to delays was our idempotency deduplication. We've improved our implementation to preserve low ingestion delays even as event throughput increases.

Orb is built for real-time event ingestion, so the API enforces a grace period on event timestamps. This ensures we're able to pre-compute queries over older usage data, making them quicker to serve (e.g. for usage graphs).

But what if you want to ingest older usage events? Some use cases we've seen include:

1. You've made a mistake in your reported events, so you want to replace the events in a time range.
2. Your usage event reporting pipeline was down for a period, so you want to fill in those events.
3. You're integrating with Orb for the first time and want to send in historical events.

You can now ingest older usage events with backfills. Backfilling usage events is now possible in 3 simple steps:

1. Create the backfill
2. Ingest events referencing that backfill
3. Close the backfill, making the updated usage data visible in Orb.

You can also revert a backfill, allowing you to undo mistakes.

Visit our docs to read about creating event backfills.

Orb's goal is to give you the tools to confidently and accurately send invoices to your customers.  

When your plan has a fixed fee that will immediately invoice your customer, you can preview the totals on this invoice to ensure that you've set up your subscription properly. Now, Orb will provide a preview of this invoice reflecting any overrides and billing terms you've configured, leading to a more predictable and safer subscription setup experience.

Credit notes are now available in Orb! Credit notes will allow you to issue a credit for an already issued invoice, thereby decreasing the amount due or, if the invoice is already paid, by adjusting the customer balance as a result. Any credit notes that reduce the amount due on an invoice will be visible in the Orb Invoicing portal for your customers. There is now a new button visible for eligible invoices to issue a credit note.

Credit notes can be issued for up to the full invoice amount and support providing an optional memo to provide customers more specific information.

The full documentation for credit notes can be found here.

Subscriptions no longer need to start at the beginning of the day. Previously, Orb enforced that all subscriptions needed to start at midnight in the customer's timezone. Now, you can pass any ISO formatted timestamp to the start_date parameter in the subscription creation request. If no timezone is provided in the string, Orb will assume the customer's timezone.

We've made it easier for your team to remove customers from Orb, directly from the customer detail page. If you still prefer to do so with our API, check out our docs.

Orb invoices that contain fixed fee quantity changes are easier to understand.

Orb will only charge for the new number of licenses at the appropriate tier (vs. a previous version where we subtracted the licenses customers had already paid for from the total number of licenses purchased)

We also updated the invoice display and description copy to reflect this. What was once called "Partial service period credit" is now "Prorated adjustment"