New in the Orbit: product updates from September

The Orb team has made some recent product improvements to improve user experience and flexibility. These updates focus on three key areas: invoicing, billing cycles, and tax management. Users can now send invoice emails from custom domains, enhancing brand consistency and customer trust. The platform has introduced more versatile billing configurations, including one-time billing cycles with custom service periods, catering to various pricing models and contract durations. Additionally, we’ve worked to streamline tax compliance management by allowing users to set customer tax exemption status directly through the Orb API. These improvements collectively offer greater control, adaptability, and efficiency in managing billing and invoicing processes.

Send invoice emails from a custom domain

Orb Invoicing now supports sending invoice emails from your email domain. This allows you to fully control the domain, sender, and reply-to for all invoice email notifications, which helps you build confidence with your customers. If you have custom email domain support included in your Orb plan, and would like to set it up, please reach out to our support team to learn more about how.

For more information on how to set up custom email domains, feel free to  check out our documentation.

Custom service periods and revenue recognition for prices

Orb now supports a one-time billing cycle and revenue recognition schedule for usage-based or fixed free prices defined in the web app or API. You might consider using a one-time billing cycle with a custom service period for SKUs that may be shorter than the term of the subscription or contract but require revenue recognition treatment, e.g. a six-month services commitment during a oneyear contract.

You have two approaches for modeling this in Orb:

• For pricing charged in-advance you can choose to set a billing cycle that’s “one time, recognized all upfront” or “one time, recognized over a custom service period” that can vary depending on the necessary revenue recognition and payment term. 
• For pricing charged in-arrears you can choose to set a billing cycle that’s “one time, recognized over a custom service period” that’s customizable depending on the necessary revenue recognition schedule and payment term. 

Set Tax Exemption Status via the API 

You can now set a customer’s tax exemption status (tax exempt or not tax-exempt) directly from the Create Customer or the Update Customer API endpoints. This enables smoother integrations and more automated workflows for managing tax compliance. 

You might use this to exclude tax collection for customers in specific countries, mark tax-exempt organizations like nonprofits or government entities as tax-exempt upon creation, or manage tax externally for a specific subset of customers.

More information about Orb's supported tax providers can be found here.

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