Gathering Invoices

#Gathering Invoices

To enable threshold billing scenarios, OpenMeter creates gathering invoices with upcoming charges for the next billing cycle. These gathering invoices show current pending charges for the user's current billing period in real-time when fetched or viewed, providing visibility into accruing usage before the final invoice is issued.

Gathering invoices are automatically deleted when the last item for a subscription has been billed for.

Given an invoice is always single currency, if the customer was migrated between currencies they might have one gathering invoice per currency.

When Progressive Billing is enabled, for partially billed periods only the remaining period is calculated. See Line Splitting in Invoice Line.

#Accessing gathering invoices

Gathering invoices can be viewed on the Customers page of the Cloud UI, or can be fetched using the list invoices:

const gatheringInvoices = await openmeter.billing.invoices.list({
  statuses: ['gathering'],
  customers: ['customer-id'],
  expand: ['lines'],
});

#Use-cases

#Checking upcoming charges

Gathering invoices contains the real-time status of the existing charges. They can be used to proactively monitor the invoice's current amounts and the lines to be billed.

#Proactive corrections

Modifications made to gathering invoices will be reflected in the next generated invoice, enabling proactive adjustments to pricing and discounts for upcoming line items.

However, these modifications do not alter the underlying customer subscription. The subscription will continue to generate future line items according to its original configuration.

For systematic changes that need to persist across billing cycles, we recommend modifying the subscription directly rather than editing gathering invoices. This ensures consistent billing behavior aligned with the intended subscription terms.