How to understand the invoice grace period in Amberflo
The purpose of the grace period is to allow for additional time to ingest meter events that are relevant to that invoice, before finalizing the invoice for payment and locking it to further changes at the conclusion of the grace period.
After the grace period, the invoice will be sent to the customer for payment.
A common ask from customers is regarding integration with cloud services like AWS, Azure, and GCP. In cases where the user is reporting customer usage directly from the cloud provider, there is a delay between when the usage takes place and is reported one hour later, and when the completely accurate usage records are finalized by the cloud provider. This delay typically lasts between 2-3 days. This means that, despite reporting the usage hourly, the records for the billing period cannot be finalized until 2-3 days after the period ends.
Today you can configure the invoice grace period from the Amberflo console by selecting Integrations -> Payments -> Stripe from the main navigation menu. Here you can select the amount of time between the end of the billing period and when the invoice will be considered locked and ready for payment.
We are working to decouple the invoice grace period from the payment gateway and make it accessible globally by following Settings -> Customize Invoice from the main navigation menu.
When sending updated meters during the grace period, meters should have the same timestamp and dimensions as the original event. Amberflo will de-dupe the events automatically and keep the latest meter value (the value most recently received for that timestamp/dimension combination).
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