You can now set up invoicing sync or accounting sync in a multi-step flow that includes configuration and mapping items from Orb to your external provider. This allows for quicker setup without having to navigate to separate pages.

Learn more about integration setup in Orb’s product 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. 

We have introduced a new API endpoint, Update Alert, that allows you to update the thresholds of an existing alert. This functionality mirrors our UI's existing edit alert flow for credit balance, usage, and cost alerts.

To learn more about Orb's alerting features, read more in our documentation.

The update subscription API endpoint allows you to make updates to the terms of an existing customer subscriptions. This added functionality allows you to programmatically update a specific subscription as your customer’s needs evolve.

This endpoint can be used to update:

• Metadata: individual keys can be removed by setting the value to null, and the entire metadata mapping can be cleared by setting metadata to null.
• Default invoice memo: update the memo on this subscription's invoices. If not provided, it is determined by the plan configuration.
• Auto collection: update whether issued invoices for this subscription will automatically be charged with the saved payment method on the due date.
• Net terms: update when the subscription’s invoices are due from after they are issued.
• Invoicing threshold: update the threshold at which an invoice will be issued for the subscription.

Learn more about this endpoint in the Orb docs.

In the change plan flow, you can now associate a discount, minimum spend, or maximum spend to a specific price on customer's subscription. You may use this flow if a customer is upgrading or downgrading their subscription to a new plan and you'd like to customize their discount given the specific contract details. To do so, start a plan change from the customer's page in Orb, select a new Plan in Price Settings, and then select "Override" to customize the minimum spend, maximum spend, or discount for a specific price. 

Customers can now receive an allocation of credits – of one or more currency units – automatically as part of their subscription. Allocations can be configured in the ‘create plan’ flow and overridden on a per-subscription basis, with an amount, optional rollover behavior, and cadence. Whereas the set of usage-based prices on the subscription determines how Orb will deduct credits from the balance (or accrue them as overages on the invoice), allocations allow you to set up a recurring schedule of increments on the customer’s credit ledger. Because allocations are configured at the plan-level, Orb allows you to standardize credit treatment and ensure consistency across thousands of customers.

Learn more 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.

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.

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.

We've added the ability to void or refund a credit block while handling downstream accounting correctly. From the adjust credits modal, you can void or refund a credit block and specify any amount on the block up to its initial balance. Orb also supports voiding partially consumed blocks, including scenarios where recognized revenue must be unrecognized. This can be used to reverse data errors or refund requests from your customers while maintaining accurate booked, deferred, recognized, and refunded revenue for accounting purposes.