How Sinpex automated billing for credit drawdown pricing

Overview

Sinpex sells a pricing model with three components: a fixed license fee, prepaid budgets, and usage-based charges, which is hard to bill manually. The license fee is fixed and due once a year. Each customer commits to a volume of AML screenings for the year and is charged for overages. All of this ran out of a spreadsheet, with someone from Sinpex rebuilding each invoice by hand every month. Rather than having to manually track and calculate an account’s usage against what they had already paid for, and check every contract every month to see if the license fee is ready to be invoiced, Sinpex is now live on Sequence’s credit-based model. Customers pay for their document budget in advance, usage is sent from BigQuery to Sequence, and we work out the drawdown and the overage.

The Challenge

1. A fixed license fee billed once a year, with every contract renewing on its own date, so each contract has to be checked every month to see if the fee is due.
2. A document budget bought upfront, drawn down at a price that changes by country, document type and page count.
3. Annual screening commitments with monthly overages, with every customer sitting at a different point in their allowance.
4. 4 types of professional services hours, each with a free allowance, a paid package and an overage rate.

“Our pricing is the reason we win deals and it was also the main reason month-end used to take our team days. Each month, we had to sit with a usage export and work out, customer by customer, what they'd used vs what they pre-paid. Then we'd go through every contract to check whether a license fee was due. None of that scaled.”

Leon Linde, Chief of Staff @ Sinpex

The Solution

Credits bought upfront and burned down at whatever the document costs: Customers buy a document budget upfront and draw down against the budget as they pull registry documents, at a price that changes based on region, type, and volume. The problem - no 2 documents cost the same. For example, a registry extract in Germany is free, in Spain it depends on how many pages the document runs to, and in France it is something else entirely. Sinpex holds all of that data in BigQuery, and they send Sequence the real cost per document and Sequence draws it down against the balance. When a customer runs the balance out, the overage is billed automatically. This was set up in a day by connecting BigQuery to Sequence’s API and now, Sinpex no longer has to check a customer’s balance to generate an invoice.

Annual commitments with overages billed monthly: Customers also commit to a volume of AML screenings for the year as part of their platform fee, and pay per screening once they go past it. Sequence tracks each customer against their own allowance and bills nothing until they cross the limit, then bills the overage every month for the rest of the term.

Professional services hours that draw down in the right order: Customers buy hours of Sinpex's time for support, training, configuration and premium support. Some are included with the support fee each month, some are bought in packages, and anything past that is charged, so every hour has to be traced to the right bucket before it can be billed. Customers get an allowance of each included with the platform every month, and can buy packages of hours on top for the year. The order matters, because a customer will always want the free allowance used first, then the hours they paid for, then the overage rate. Sinpex sends Sequence the hours with the type and who delivered them, and Sequence applies them in that order. This pricing structure caused a lot of headaches when we handled it manually.

Invoices customers can read: With that many usage products on a contract, most months a customer will not have touched half of them. Sequence hides the lines with no usage, so the invoice shows what they used and what they owe and nothing else. Sinpex keeps the full picture on their side, and invoices flow through to DATEV.

“Our pricing works for our customers, but billing it by hand didn't work for us at scale. Sequence gave us back a lot of time, cut down on billing mistakes and lets us keep our finance team lean. We went live within a quarter and month-end is no longer something anyone here thinks about.”

Leon Linde, Chief of Staff @ Sinpex

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