Credits

Lotus’ credit system offers your customers more flexibility when accessing your product. With it, you can offer a promotional credit for new customers’ first usage up to a certain dollar amount, reimburse customers for downtime or missed SLAs, or offer discounted prepayment options.

Credits are tracked in a credit ledger, an append-only log of all credits-related transactions for a customer, providing a full audit log for the current credit balance and ensuring that a transaction can never be deleted.

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Seeing a Customer’s Credits

To check a customer’s credit balance, you can easily navigate to the “Credits” tab on their account page. This section provides a comprehensive overview of all credit grants, including effective/expiration dates and associated drawdowns.

To check a customer’s credit balance, simply navigate to the “Credits” tab on their account page. Here, you’ll find a detailed breakdown of all credit grants, including effective/expiration dates and associated drawdowns.

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Granting Credits

To provide your customers with credit, you can simply click on the “Create Credit” button. This prompts you to input the amount, currency, and any associated charges for the credit. Additionally, credits are automatically granted when the total of an invoice is negative.

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Consuming Credits

Credits are automatically deducted from a customer’s invoice balance (after tax) at invoice generation time. Additionally, you can manually draw down or void a customer’s credit balance if necessary. When consuming credits, they will be drawn down first by expiration date and then by cost basis. Additionally, when voiding a credit, only the unconsumed portion of the credit will be voided.

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Future Developments

Currently, credits can only be granted and consumed in a fixed set of currencies. We are planning on expanding credits to support custom pricing units, which will allow for billing models like Twitch’s Bits, where you can grant credits in a custom unit of measure, like “Cloud Units” or “Tokens”, and define your plans with these custom pricing units too.

If you’d like to see this feature sooner, please let us know by emailing founders@uselotus.io or joining our Slack community.