Enterprise billing with Orb
Enterprise customers require sophisticated billing capabilities that go beyond standardized self-serve offerings. This comprehensive guide demonstrates how to leverage Orb’s enterprise features to handle complex contract negotiations, custom pricing structures, and the operational realities of enterprise sales cycles.
Unlike self-serve customers who typically adopt standardized plans, enterprise customers often negotiate:
- Complex pricing structures with volume discounts, tiered commitments, and custom rate cards
- Extended payment terms (30, 60, or 90+ day net terms) with custom invoicing requirements
- Multi-phase implementations with trial periods, ramp schedules, and milestone-based pricing
- Shared credit pools across multiple business units, subsidiaries, or geographical regions
- Backdated contract amendments to align with complex renewal negotiations and late signatures
- Custom reporting and analytics for internal chargeback and budget allocation
Orb’s diff-based billing architecture uniquely enables these enterprise requirements by allowing you to make changes effective as of any past date, automatically recalculating invoices and credit consumption without manual intervention—a capability that sets Orb apart from traditional billing systems.
Why Orb excels for enterprise billing
Real-time backdating without manual reconciliation
Unlike traditional billing systems that require complex manual processes for backdated changes, Orb’s architecture automatically handles retroactive pricing changes with automatic invoice recalculation, credit consumption adjustments for historical periods, usage re-rating when contract terms change mid-period, and audit-safe amendments that preserve complete transaction history.
Flexible contract modeling
Orb supports both standardized enterprise tiers and completely custom contracts. You can use plan templates with customer-specific overrides for scalable enterprise offerings, create completely custom contracts for unique arrangements, or implement hybrid approaches that combine standardized components with custom terms.
Enterprise-scale event processing
For the largest enterprise customers generating massive event volumes, Orb offers hosted rollups that can handle billions of events per day. While Orb’s native ingestion pathway supports up to 1,000 events per second (over 86 million events daily), hosted rollups enable real-time usage data processing spanning petabytes of events.
Hosted rollups are particularly valuable for enterprise customers with high-frequency usage tracking (API calls, data transfers, compute operations), real-time billing requirements with sub-minute aggregation windows, complex dimensional analysis across multiple grouping properties, and massive scale operations requiring sustained throughput exceeding hundreds of thousands of events per second.
The rollup architecture uses intermediate cloud buckets as durable message queues, with configurable grouping properties, aggregation functions, and time windows (default 10 minutes with 30-second partial rollups).
Enterprise-grade operational features
Orb provides customer hierarchy for complex organizational billing, multi-currency support with automatic conversion, advanced adjustments with granular targeting and scheduling, and phase-based subscriptions with manual and automatic triggers.
Enterprise contract modeling
Understanding your contract options
Enterprise customers typically require one of three approaches, each with distinct advantages:
Plan templates with subscription overrides
Best for: Standardized enterprise tiers with customer-specific modifications
This approach maintains plan lineage for easy upgrades and downgrades, supports trial phases and plan-based mutations, and enables standardized enterprise offerings with customization. You can replace specific prices with enterprise-negotiated rates, add custom adjustments for volume discounts, and set enterprise-specific terms like extended net payment periods.
Custom contracts from scratch
Best for: Completely unique arrangements that don’t fit any standard template
Custom contracts provide complete flexibility for unique requirements, no constraints from existing plan structures, and full control over all pricing and billing terms. This approach is ideal for Fortune 500 customers with completely bespoke requirements that don’t align with any standardized offering.
Hybrid approach with customer hierarchy
Best for: Large enterprises with multiple business units requiring different pricing
This approach allows you to create parent-child customer relationships where different business units can have their own pricing while rolling up to a single invoice. Engineering divisions might use compute-heavy plans while marketing divisions use analytics-focused plans, all appearing on the parent company’s consolidated invoice.
Advanced contract structuring
Multi-year contracts with annual adjustments
Enterprise contracts often span multiple years with predetermined price changes. Orb’s phase-based subscriptions allow you to model these complex arrangements with automatic transitions between pricing periods. Each phase can have its own duration, pricing structure, and discount levels.
For example, you might structure a three-year deal with a 25% onboarding discount in year one, 15% standard enterprise discount in year two, and 10% renewal pricing in the final year, with 5% annual price increases built into each phase.
Milestone-based implementations
For enterprise customers with complex rollout schedules, you can create manually triggered phases that advance based on implementation milestones rather than time. This might include a pilot phase with limited users, a department rollout phase with tiered pricing, and an enterprise-wide phase with volume pricing.
Each phase can be triggered when specific implementation milestones are reached, giving you complete control over when pricing changes take effect based on actual deployment progress rather than arbitrary dates.
Representing complex negotiated discounts
Enterprise contracts often include sophisticated discount structures that go beyond simple percentage reductions.
Product-specific enterprise rates
You can apply different discount levels to different product categories using adjustments. For example, compute services might receive a 20% discount due to high volume commitments, storage services might get a 15% standard enterprise rate, and support services might include a $1,000 monthly credit.
Graduated discount structures
Orb’s tiered pricing models naturally support graduated discount structures where discounts increase with usage volume. You can structure pricing so that the first 10,000 units are at standard rates, the next 40,000 units receive a 20% discount, the next 50,000 units get a 40% discount, and everything above 100,000 units receives a 60% discount.
Time-based promotional discounts
Using adjustment intervals, you can schedule discounts for specific time periods without modifying the underlying subscription. This is perfect for new customer promotions, seasonal discounts, or other time-limited offers that automatically expire without manual intervention.
Enterprise payment terms and invoicing
Sophisticated payment terms
Enterprise customers often require complex payment arrangements including extended net terms (30, 60, or 90+ days), disabled auto-collection for manual payment processing, invoicing thresholds to batch smaller charges, and custom invoice memos with purchase order references and remittance instructions.
Custom invoice presentation
Orb supports custom invoice grouping using grouping keys from your event data. If your events contain properties like cluster_name, department, or region, Orb can automatically reorganize invoices to group line items by these properties rather than aggregating across all instances.
For multi-currency scenarios, Orb supports pricing in custom currencies (virtual pricing units) with automatic conversion to real-world invoicing currencies. When customers exceed their prepaid credits, overage is automatically converted using configured conversion rates.
Purchase order integration
Enterprise customers often require purchase order references on invoices. Orb’s custom invoice memos can include purchase order numbers, contract references, department codes, and other required information that appears on both the invoice PDF and in the invoice portal.
Enterprise prepaid credits and commitment management
Multiple custom pricing units
Orb supports multiple custom pricing units, each with its own credit ledger. This allows you to separate credits for different services—compute credits, storage credits, API credits—each with their own conversion rates to the plan’s invoicing currency for overage billing.
Shared enterprise credit pools
For large enterprises with multiple business units, Orb’s customer hierarchy enables shared credit consumption across child customers. Credits purchased by the parent customer can be consumed by child customers, with all usage appearing on the parent’s consolidated invoice. This simplifies procurement while providing detailed usage visibility by business unit.
Orb’s differentiated backdating architecture
This is where Orb truly excels compared to traditional billing systems. Enterprise sales cycles often result in complex timing scenarios that require retroactive changes.
Complex renewal scenarios
Consider a Fortune 500 customer whose 3-year contract expired on January 1st, but renewal negotiations continued until March 15th. The new contract includes a 25% discount on all services effective January 1st, new minimum spend commitments, and additional services starting February 1st.
Traditional billing systems would require manual invoice adjustments for January-March, complex credit recalculations, and lengthy reconciliation processes with high risk of errors.
Orb automatically voids original January-March invoices, recalculates all usage with the 25% discount, applies new minimum commitments retroactively, adjusts credit consumption for the entire period, and issues corrected invoices with a complete audit trail.
Mid-contract pricing corrections
When an enterprise customer was incorrectly charged 0.08/unit for two months, Orb automatically identifies all affected invoices, recalculates usage at the correct rate, voids incorrect invoices and issues corrections, adjusts the credit ledger for overpayments, and provides a complete audit trail for compliance.
Credit adjustments for backdated changes
When pricing changes affect credit consumption retroactively, Orb automatically adjusts credit ledgers to reflect the corrected consumption amounts, maintaining accurate balances and providing detailed audit trails for all adjustments.
Advanced enterprise operational workflows
Enterprise approval workflows with pending changes
Large enterprises often require multi-stakeholder approval processes for subscription changes, contract amendments, and pricing modifications. Orb’s pending changes feature enables sophisticated approval workflows by staging changes without immediately applying them.
For enterprise contract modifications requiring legal, finance, and procurement approval, you can create pending changes that show the post-change subscription state as a preview, generate invoice previews for stakeholder review, prevent further mutations until approved or canceled, and expire automatically after 24 hours if not acted upon.
The typical workflow involves sales creating a pending change with negotiated terms, finance reviewing the invoice impact using the preview, legal approving contract modifications, procurement validating purchase order requirements, and the system applying the change once all approvals are collected.
Contract amendments and upsells
When enterprise customers expand their usage or add new services mid-contract, Orb’s price intervals allow you to model these changes with precise start and end dates, ensuring accurate billing for partial periods and smooth transitions between pricing structures.
Renewal management
For enterprise renewals, you can create new subscriptions or schedule plan changes well in advance, ensuring seamless transitions between contract periods without billing gaps or overlaps.
Enterprise customer visibility and reporting
Real-time usage dashboards
Orb’s upcoming invoice API provides enterprise customers with visibility into their current billing period usage and costs, credits consumed and remaining balances, and line item breakdowns by service. This enables real-time spend tracking and budget management.
Historical invoice analysis
The list invoices endpoint enables enterprise customers to analyze historical spending patterns, track usage trends over time, and generate detailed reports for internal cost allocation and budget planning.
Credit balance monitoring
For enterprise customers with prepaid credits, Orb’s credit balance APIs provide real-time visibility into active credit blocks and remaining balances, essential for enterprise budget tracking and spend management.
Compliance and enterprise governance
Immutable audit trails
Orb maintains immutable records of all billing changes with timestamps and reasons for all pricing modifications, complete credit ledger transaction history, and preserved original documents alongside corrections for invoice amendments.
Revenue recognition support
Orb’s accounting period locks prevent changes to closed periods, ensuring compliance with revenue recognition requirements and providing the controls enterprise finance teams need for accurate reporting.
Data exports for enterprise systems
Enterprise customers often need to integrate billing data with their ERP or accounting systems. Orb’s data exports provide daily usage summaries for internal cost allocation, monthly invoice details for accounting reconciliation, credit consumption reports for budget tracking, and subscription and customer data for CRM integration.
Integration with enterprise systems
Orb provides Salesforce integration for syncing customer and subscription data, NetSuite integration for automated invoice and payment sync, webhook notifications for real-time billing event updates, and comprehensive API access for custom integrations with internal systems.
Best practices for enterprise success
Design for scale from day one
Enterprise contracts grow in complexity over time. Build your pricing architecture to accommodate future service additions without requiring contract renegotiation, organizational changes like acquisitions or divestitures, geographic expansion with local currency and tax requirements, volume growth with appropriate tier structures, and event volume scaling from thousands to billions of events per day.
For enterprise customers expecting massive usage volumes, consider Orb’s hosted rollups early in your architecture planning. While native ingestion handles most enterprise needs (up to 86 million events daily), customers with high-frequency operations may benefit from rollup configurations that can process hundreds of thousands of events per second with real-time aggregation.
Leverage Orb’s unique capabilities
Don’t constrain enterprise requirements to fit traditional billing limitations. Use custom contracts for truly unique arrangements, leverage backdating for complex renewal scenarios, implement customer hierarchy for organizational billing, and utilize phase-based pricing for implementation schedules.
Plan for operational complexity
Enterprise billing requires careful operational planning. Integrate with existing systems using Orb’s APIs and webhooks, set up proper monitoring for credit pools and spend thresholds, configure appropriate alerts for balance depletion scenarios, plan for manual interventions when automated processes need oversight, and design approval workflows using pending changes for contract modifications requiring multi-stakeholder sign-off.
Provide enterprise-grade transparency
Enterprise customers expect detailed visibility including real-time usage dashboards, historical analysis with detailed invoice breakdowns, credit consumption tracking with clear remaining balances, and audit trails for all billing changes and adjustments.
Plan for the entire customer lifecycle
Consider the full enterprise journey including onboarding complexity with multiple stakeholders and approval processes, mid-contract changes driven by business evolution and growth, renewal negotiations with changing requirements and pricing, and potential churn scenarios requiring prorated refunds and credit handling.
Test complex scenarios thoroughly
Enterprise billing complexity requires comprehensive testing of backdated contract changes with multiple pricing tiers and adjustments, credit pool exhaustion and top-up scenarios, multi-currency transactions if operating globally, and customer hierarchy changes affecting billing relationships.
Maintain clear documentation
Enterprise contracts require meticulous record-keeping. Use descriptive reasons for all adjustments and pricing changes, reference contract numbers in invoice memos and metadata, document business logic behind complex pricing structures, and maintain audit trails for all backdated changes and their justifications.
By following these practices and leveraging Orb’s enterprise-grade capabilities, you can handle sophisticated billing requirements while maintaining operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. Orb’s unique architecture ensures that enterprise complexity doesn’t compromise billing accuracy or create unsustainable manual overhead for your team.