Orb now has support for creating hierarchical relationships between your customers to power flexible pricing, usage aggregation, and invoicing.
This capability is particularly valuable when your customers desire to aggregate usage across multiple customers on a single parent invoice while maintaining the ability to configure pricing per customer or groups of customers.
Learn more about this new powerful capability in our product documentation
In-arrears fixed fees can now be denominated in virtual currencies (custom credits). These fees will automatically deduct from customers' prepaid credit balances, similar to usage-based fees.
This enhancement enables new pricing scenarios — for example, you can now set enterprise support fees in credits that draw from the customer's prepaid enterprise commitment rather than triggering a separate charge.
We have launched a new API endpoint for creating credit notes, enabling you to issue credit notes for specific line items on an invoice. This feature allows for programmatic issuance of credit notes, supporting bulk actions for multiple customers and enhancing customer experience by providing faster processing for refunds or adjustments.
For detailed information on how to credit an invoice, refer to the credit notes section in our documentation.
Orb Invoicing now supports the ability to send invoice emails from your own domain. This allows you to fully control the domain and sender of all invoice emails, helping to build confidence when sending invoices to your customers. Learn more here.
For customers with custom email domain support included in your plan, please reach out to your support representative to configure the feature.
Orb now supports adding negative line items when editing an invoice in the Orb webapp! If you want to credit a customer's invoice or correct a mistake on an invoice, creating a negative line item in invoice edits is an easy way to ensure the customer's invoice is issued correctly and without confusion.
Metadata is a key-value object that lets you store customizable information on Orb core resources. In addition to Customer, Subscription, and Plan, you can now update metadata on the Price and Invoice objects through two newly-released endpoints. Learn more about them here:
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.
Orb is designed to remove manual toil from the invoicing process while still giving you the ability to make manual adjustments when needed. To better support this, we've added the option to manually issue invoices in the webapp or API rather than having Orb issue them automatically.
When manual invoice review is turned on, invoices that have passed their grace period will appear as "Action needed", indicating that they can be manually issued. These invoices can be edited and won't be sent to customers until manually issued.
Manual invoice review can make it easier to get started with Orb Invoicing, allowing you to validate that invoices are correct before sending them to customers, and unlocking enterprise workflows that require manually reviewing and adjusting invoices for customers each billing period.
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:
