Rethinking invoices to empower your accountant

Earlier this week, we released some changes in how we present our invoices. The result: invoices that help you understand what you pay and what to expect next time.

As an introduction, let’s describe our problem: Clever Cloud bills you for the services you used over a given period, and asks you to credit your account in advance to cover the next billing period. The next invoice will consume your prepaid credits and ask for more credits for the next period, and so on. Up until now, your credits balance at a given time was not clearly displayed. That was a problem. The other problem lies in the management of free credits. These free credits have an expiration date. We had to write this explicitly in the invoices.

Now that we have expressed our problem, let’s dive into the solution!

A clearer first page

First, we reworded items on the first page. In part to please our new legal service, but mostly because the existing terms were confusing. E.g. where you had “Clever Cloud consumption”, you get “Platform usage fees”. Add a few tweaks to make this first page easy to understand: we display a subtotal of everything you owe us for using the service (that’s the new “Total fees” line). After that we display how much credits where removed or need to be added to your prepaid account. This gives us the grand total to pay.

Explicating free credits

The next change appears on the second page: we give you a breakdown of all the free credits consumed / expired this month and how we compute the credits to remove or to add to the invoice.

On this second page you have: all the free credits you are entitled to, which ones have come to expire, how much you still have left to cover the next billing period. You also have all the variables we use to compute the added or consumed credits that show on the first page.

This second page will help you keep track of your prepaid credits balance and have a better understanding of why we charge you this specific amount.

With these changes, your accountant should be happy! Hopefully, this will help them understand our invoices and give them time they can spend trying to figure out invoices of your other providers! 😇