Invoicing & Billing Overview

Octane can act as your central hub for billing through integrations with common payment providers and automated invoicing tools. You can use the Octane Portal to configure a payment provider, enable automated invoicing, charge customers at the end of each billing period, and automatically handle payment failures.

This page aims to provide an overview of how invoicing and billing can be configured through the Octane Portal and direct you to further documentation for these features.

Payment Providers

Octane integrates with popular third-party payment providers to allow you to automatically charge customers at the end of each billing period.

Currently, you can integrate Octane with the following payment providers:

• Stripe via Stripe Connect
• Paddle via the Paddle API

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Invoicing with a payment provider

Note that the behavior of some Invoicing & Billing features may change depending on whether you have a payment provider configured.

For example, when you have a payment provider configured, it becomes possible to deliver invoices to customers through that provider's invoicing system. Of course, opting to deliver invoices through your payment provider will stop invoices from being sent by Octane directly.

Invoicing

When Invoice Delivery is configured, Octane will automate the process of sending customers an invoice at the end of a billing cycle. For each customer, a PDF invoice will be generated (following an Invoice Grace Period) at the end of each billing cycle, and that PDF will be emailed to the address stored by Octane for that customer. This is the outline of the invoicing process:

1. A customer reaches the end of their billing cycle.

2. Octane waits for the Invoice Grace Period to elapse before generating the final invoice.

   This grace period provides extra time for Octane to collect all measurements that occurred during the billing period, even if there is a delay between when usage measurements are taken and when your application uploads those measurements. You can also use this period to verify usage totals, make corrections to the data, or validate the data in some other way before the invoice is sent.

3. Octane computes the customer's total charges.

   A revenue ledger is maintained by Octane to record the revenue accrued from each customer over time. The total amount owed by a customer at the end of a billing cycle is calculated using this data.

4. Any credits, discounts, or free trials that are associated with the customer are applied to the revenue ledger computations.

5. Octane generates the final invoice to send to the customer.

   When Invoicing via Payment Provider is disabled, Octane will generate a PDF invoice to email to the customer.

   In contrast, when Invoicing via Payment Provider is enabled, Octane will use the native Invoicing API of your payment provider to send the invoice. This feature is useful for computing and collecting local taxes from each customer (which is supported by Stripe) or when you are migrating from a different billing solution incrementally.

6. (Optional) Octane charges the customer through the configured payment gateway after the Payment Grace Period has elapsed.

   The Payment Grace Period defines the period between the time the invoice was generated and the time Octane takes any user-facing actions (such as charging the customer's credit card). You may use this grace period to validate the final invoice against the usage measurements you have recorded.

You can have a look at Octane's Invoice Settings documentation for a deeper explanation of our Invoicing feature.