Invoices
How are customer invoices calculated?
Invoices are statements of products or services sold to a customer.
Invoices are calculated at the end of each customer's billing cycle based on the plans assigned to that customer and the usage metrics recorded during the billing period. If you haven't already read the sections on plans and usage metrics we recommend you read those before continuing here.
Generating Invoices
Invoices are generated automatically at the end of each billing cycle, and they can also be generated manually through the dashboard.
Scheduled Invoices
Kable automatically generates invoices at the end of each customer's billing cycle.
All billing cycle cutoffs are bounded at midnight UTC. Kable waits one hour after midnight to process invoices (to account for any delays in delivery), but honors only events timestamped within date boundaries in a given invoice.
As an example, if a customer's billing cycle ends on the 1st of the month:
- metrics recorded at 10:30am PST on April 30th (5:30pm UTC) will be counted toward the May invoice
- metrics recorded at 9:30pm PST on April 30th will be counted toward the May invoice (because 9:30pm PST is 4:30am UTC on May 1st).
Manual Invoices
You can also generate invoices manually from the Invoices tab in your dashboard. Generating invoices manually is not recommended in the Live environment, but it can be a great way to test your implementation in the Test environment.
Invoices and Integrations
Kable integrates with popular payment and accounting software providers to create a complete financial picture throughout your business stack. You can learn more about payment and accounting integrations in other sections of the documentation.
If you have connected payment or accounting software to your Kable account, Kable can push customer invoices into your integrated accounts.
- Scheduled invoices will automatically be processed through your payment or accounting service providers for any customers who have a customer reference ID defined.
- For payment integrations, this means that a customer configured with a
stripeCustomerId
on Kable will have their default Stripe payment charged at the end of a Kable billing cycle. - For accounting integrations, this means that a customer configured with an accounting
referenceId
will have invoices pushed into the associated account in your general ledger.
- For payment integrations, this means that a customer configured with a
- Manual invoices will not be processed automatically through your payment or accounting partners. However, if you'd like to process a manually-generated invoice through Stripe, QuickBooks, or any other service, you can do so by clicking Process on the invoice in your Kable dashboard.
You can read more about payment integrations and accounting integrations in later sections of the documentation.
Downloading Invoices and Reports
Once invoices have been generated on Kable, they are available for download as PDF statements or CSV reports.
Downloading Invoice PDFs
You can download invoices directly through the dashboard or through the download invoice API.
Including invoice PDFs in transactional emails to your customers is very common (and easy!). To send invoice PDFs to your customers, subscribe to an invoice.created
webhook, and leverage the download invoice API when constructing your email message. You can send email messages with an in-house system or a third party email tool, but the important point to note here is that your customers will receive emails from your business's email address, not an @kable.io email address.
Downloading Invoice Report CSVs
Invoice reports and invoice history can be downloaded as a CSV by navigating to the Invoices tab in your dashboard and clicking Download Invoice History.
There are several applications for invoice history reports. You can use these reports to analyze MRR versus overage revenue, or to provide a snapshot into your most revenue-generating customers. Each line item of each invoice for each customer is represented as a row in the CSV.
Updated 5 months ago