For years, the conversation around usage-based billing has focused on metering. How do you ingest millions of events? How do you calculate usage accurately at scale? How do you turn raw data into a bill?
These are important engineering questions, but they only tell half the story.
Through our work with finance leaders at growing companies, we've gone deep on the challenges that come after an invoice is sent. The handoff between engineering and finance—between billing and revenue—is where many teams hit friction.
And here's the thing: your metering doesn't matter much if you don't actually get paid.
The invoice isn't the finish line
Most metering platforms treat invoice generation as the endpoint. Calculate the usage, apply the pricing, send the bill. But finance teams know there's more work to do. Getting paid is often the most time-consuming part of the process.
Finance teams spend hours each month tracking down unpaid invoices and following up with customers. When your billing system stops at the invoice, you're left building spreadsheets to answer a basic question: Who owes us money, and for how long?
That's why we built the AR aging report in Orb.
From metering to revenue
Orb's AR aging report gives you a clear view of outstanding invoices, organized by how long they've been unpaid. It's the visibility finance teams need to prioritize collection efforts and understand cash flow, without switching between systems.
Paired with Orb's revenue recognition reporting, you now have visibility from metering through revenue realization. The workflow that used to require multiple tools and manual work is now in one place.
As one of our customers at TigerData told us:
"Your accounts receivable module couldn't have come at a better time, to be honest. It's a godsend just because there's nothing else that is closer to our invoices and our status right now than Orb itself... I've been using it already for a couple of days and it's going to be the blueprint of our chasing efforts."
Built for flexibility
We've always designed Orb to work alongside your existing systems. Many of our customers use Orb with their current systems of record for month-end close, and that flexibility matters.
But we're also hearing more interest in a different approach: connecting usage-based billing directly to finance workflows without the constant reconciliation. AR aging is part of that—giving finance teams the tools they need connected to the source of truth for all revenue data.
Contract to revenue
Earlier this year, we launched Orb Contract-to-Cash, which handles the front end of usage-based billing by automatically parsing contract terms and setting up customers to bill. AR aging completes the picture downstream.
Together, they reflect our goal: supporting the full lifecycle of usage-based monetization, from contract to recognized revenue.
Usage-based billing isn't just an engineering problem. It involves sales, product, engineering, and finance. The companies that handle it well are the ones that think about the entire process, not just the technical pieces.
Get started
Want to see AR aging reporting in action? Check out our documentation or talk to our team about how Orb can support your revenue lifecycle.
Because the best metering system doesn't help much if you can't close the loop on getting paid.
