In January, Orb shipped new features designed to make your billing operations more powerful. This roundup includes custom pricing units, an enhanced capability to apply discounts in bulk, increased invoicing efficiency, and a new status page. 

‍Build one or multiple custom pricing units

‍You asked, we listened: credits across multiple dimensions! You can now create one or multiple custom pricing units and assign pricing each to a specific price in your plans.

Once you set up the custom pricing units, you can set a unit price for each in the plan creation flow to support overage calculations. Downstream, Orb will also display usage and overage line items on your customer's invoice in the appropriate pricing unit.

For example, you might offer three types of credits: Storage, Compute, and Support. Now, you can create three custom pricing units, one for each. When you create your plan, you can add a price in each unit. As your customers accrue usage for each unit, the corresponding credit blocks will be deducted. For instance, if a customer accrued Storage usage, only the Storage credits will be deducted.

Apply discounts with more control and efficiency

You can now apply discounts, maximums, and minimums to a subset of prices within a plan. Based on your settings, Orb will automatically calculate the discounts, maximum, and miniums on your customer invoice. For example, if you would like to apply a $100 minimum spend requirement to two out of three prices in your pricing plan, Storage and Support, then Orb will only count the spend for the two prices towards the minimum. Orb will not count the spend for the third price, Upload Events, towards the minimum.

Increase invoicing efficiency

We streamlined invoicing workflows so you can now issue one-off, immediate fixed fee invoices within minutes. In addition, we increased invoice issuance throughput by 5x, which means you can continue to count on Orb to handle large data loads and support exponential growth.

New status page: stay up to date with Orb’s uptime

As a part of our commitment to transparency and customer trust, we released a status page. You can use the page to learn more about the reliability and uptime of Orb’s APIs, Ingest, Webhooks, and Invoicing. You can also track any reported incidents by subscribing to the page.

Do you have any questions or feedback about the product updates? Comment on the changelog post. 

In billing, details matter – a lot. This is why we continue to improve usability. Specifically, we know how important it is to gain visibility into prepaid credits and ensure that customers are not surprised by overages.

Increase invoicing efficiency

We streamlined invoicing workflows. You can now issue one-off, immediate fixed fee invoices within minutes. In addition, we increased invoice issuance throughput by 5x, which means you can continue to count on Orb to handle large data loads and support exponential growth.

Set up credit usage alerts with one click

Stay on top of customer usage to proactively communicate at the right time by creating balance alerts in Orb. You can create these alerts to notify you when your customers' credit balances are low or depleted. This can help you and your team prevent surprises and create positive customer experiences. 

Manage prepaid credits more easily 

You can now enable prepaid credits in the Orb dashboard and select the currency for your needs. Learn more about setting up prepaid credits here.

That's it for this update. If you have any feedback on the feature enhancements, please comment on this post.

December is here! We are excited to share the top four features that were shipped in October and November. This roundup includes Orb’s Salesforce integration, self-serve SSO control, SDKs, and capabilities to backdate prepaid credits.

Turbocharge sales workflows with automated provisioning Salesforce integration

Orb's Salesforce integration now helps reduce manual work and save time for sales teams. This integration automatically creates net-new plans in Orb corresponding to your customers’ negotiated pricing when a new opportunity is closed. This is an exciting update that adds to our existing capabilities, which syncs usage data from Orb into Salesforce.

In contrast to existing solutions in the market, we developed the integration to allow your sales teams to configure all fields on a customer or subscription from within Salesforce. Learn more about the advanced provisioning integration by contacting us or reading the docs.

Gain more control over who sees your revenue data

Orb admins can now enable or modify SSO authentication requirements in the Security tab of Settings. When password log-ins are not enough, SSO ensures consistent control across multiple systems, aligning access rights with business roles and responsibilities.

In addition, enabling SSO is considered a best practice in preparation for future audit and compliance reviews. SSO facilitates centralized logging and provides a clear access trail, enabling organizations to trace who accessed revenue data, when, and what actions were taken. Orb supports Google, Microsoft, or any SAML SSO solution.

Learn more by reading our docs.

Expedite Orb integration with thoughtfully designed SDKs

Integrate with Orb using the new SDKs. We designed them to serve three capabilities to ensure that Orb consistently delivers a great developer experience:

1. Request idempotency support is built in so you don’t have to worry about double subscribing a customer. Retries are handled by the SDKs so transient errors are dealt with.
2. The SDKs are autogenerated from our OpenAPI spec so they are automatically updated as the SDKs change.
3. Type safety is built into SDKs for request and response types so you can use autocomplete in your editor and static type checking. 

Orb SDKs are available in Python, Node.js/Typescript, and Go. Learn more about them here or check out this demo.

Unlock the full potential of prepaid credits

Say goodbye to manual corrections to backdating prepaid credits. With the new backdating feature, Orb users can align billing with contract signing dates. They can also help customers avoid overages if they run out of credits during your renegotiations. Simply set up credits with a backdated effective date and let Orb do the math. Charge customers accurately without worrying about revenue gaps.

Do you have any questions or feedback about the product updates above? Please share them by commenting on this post.

Starting today, SDKs for Orb are available in Python (orb-billing on PyPI), Node.js/Typescript (orb-billing on NPM), and Go (github.com/orbcorp/orb-go). We’re pretty excited about the ergonomic wins these SDKs bring when it comes to integrating with Orb. They offer a wide range of benefits including autocomplete, static checking, retries, idempotency support, and more!

Additionally, if an Orb SDK isn’t available in your language of choice, our OpenAPI spec can help you get up and running with one quickly!

Orb's sales automation integration brings the full power of Orb's APIs natively into Salesforce. This integration allows your sales operation team to build customizable, automated provisioning workflows via Salesforce Flow. Whereas Salesforce integrations are typically limited in scope and functionality to a rigid set of pre-determined fields, Orb's Salesforce integration allows you to configure all fields on a customer or subscription from within Salesforce.

With this integration, you can: Automatically create an Orb subscription when an opportunity is closed, also transferring the customer information and metadata as appropriate Use details from custom or native objects in Salesforce (e.g. an Order) to properly set pricing information in Orb. This integration enables incredibly powerful workflows, including those that create net-new plans corresponding to your customer's order structure.

Because your sales reps work directly in Salesforce, this automation minimizes the incidence of manual errors because it eliminates re-entry of billing details in Orb — once set up, information syncs between systems seamlessly.

This video explains how you can use the integration to automatically create an Orb customer and subscription with custom contract overrides when a Salesforce Opportunity is moved to the Closed/Won stage. Visit the docs for more detailed documentation.

The new billable metric "Debugging" tab enables you to test your metric before publishing. It shows you the result of evaluating the metric for a customer over a time range without needing to create a subscription. To create a new metric, we recommend the following workflow:

1. Define the metric and save it as a draft (with "Save & exit").
2. Verify the metric returns the expected results on a few customers using the "Debugging" tab in the billable metric detail page.
3. Change the metric if necessary and repeat verification.
4. Publish the metric.

We've added powerful support to modify ongoing subscriptions in Orb by introducing the ability to add, remove, or edit individual prices on a subscription. This allows you to model complex billing behaviors like optional add-on prices while maintaining total control over billing and invoicing. Additionally, you can now add or change prices on a subscription without the need for a heavyweight plan change or disruptions to normal invoicing behavior.

Whether changes are backdated to the past or scheduled for the future, Orb will ensure correctness, modifying and issuing new invoices to ensure your customers are billed properly. See our docs for more details on use cases and behavior. And to visualize changes to a subscription's prices over time prices over time, you can use the new subscription timeline view.

Orb now supports creating plans from the API! Plans in Orb define a set of prices along with the billing behavior of any subscriptions associated to that plan.

For example, you can now use the API to define "Enterprise" or "Pro" plans corresponding to a different combination of fixed and usage-based prices. Reflecting the powerful capabilities of Orb's configurable platform, all of Orb's pricing models can now be defined on a plan via the API. Check out the API docs to get started.

The invoice accounting sync is now fully self-serve! In the new Accounting settings tab you can configure your accounting syncs, which will automatically send Orb invoice data to your accounting provider. You can easily control what is synced to your accounting provider. It can be easily turned on and off as needed.

There is also a new sync record view! You can see a full audit trail of sync attempts in the record view, it will be simple to find the set of records that have not been successfully sent to your accounting provider here. From the record view, you can resync records that were previously synced and you can retry any failures once any necessary manual actions have been taken.

Orb now supports invoicing customers through NetSuite. Now, you can choose to invoice customers via Orb natively, or Stripe Invoicing, Quickbooks, Bill.com, or Netsuite.  

Similar to other integrations, this invoicing process syncs each line item on the invoice individually, attaches the appropriate NetSuite product, and links it to a customer in your NetSuite instance.

Orb additionally pushes revenue recognition information to NetSuite, which allows you to leverage NetSuite's Advanced Revenue Management module to properly recognize revenue for subscriptions in Orb.

Connect your NetSuite account in the Settings page in the Orb dashboard, and click here <https://docs.withorb.com/guides/invoicing/invoicing-providers/netsuite> to read more about invoicing via NetSuite.