To accommodate cases where an invoice needs to be edited manually, Orb has a powerful adjustments workflow. Adjustments on a draft invoice can be used to add additional fixed fees, change discounts/minimums, and edit existing line items.

You can use adjustments on an Orb invoice to:

  1. Capture a one-off charge that’s not part of a recurring contract. For example, this may be required to capture support hours that need to be billed adhoc.
  2. Increase the discount on the invoice to reflect a mistake in how usage was reported to Orb, or because of an out-of-band conversation with your customer.
  3. Remove a contracted minimum to reflect a delayed integration cycle where the customer isn’t fully onboarded onto your platform.
  4. Add a negative line item to easily give a customer credit or correct a mistake on the invoice.

Once an invoice has been adjusted, the line items, subtotal, and total are immediately updated to reflect the change. By default, invoice adjustments are visible your users in the invoice portal as well as the internal view of the invoice.

Note that there are cases where invoice adjustments may not persist in light of manual actions taken. Manual edits to an upcoming draft invoice are often not retained when:

  • Subscription is cancelled: Orb generates a new invoice rather than modifying the existing one since the invoice may now only contain a subset of the line items (e.g. no in-advance fee for the upcoming billing period).
  • Subscription is edited: Changes to subscription pricing, such as adding or removing prices, can trigger regeneration of the draft invoice.
  • Plan is migrated to a new version: When a subscription moves to a new plan version, the draft invoice is typically regenerated to reflect the new plan structure.

In all these cases, the draft invoice regeneration process does not carry over any manual adjustments that were previously applied, and these edits will need to be reapplied if still relevant.