Playbook, SaaS company
Explaining how a charge was calculated without ever seeing the charge
Billing questions differ from pricing questions in one way that changes everything about the handling: the money has already moved. Nobody is evaluating anything. Somebody in finance has an amount on a statement that does not match what they expected, or needs a document reissued with a tax number on it, and the assistant has no view of either the statement or the document.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for billing and invoices holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The charge has already been taken, so the visitor wants an explanation and often a correction, and a correction is a write into a system the assistant cannot touch.
- Half of these arrive from a finance team who have never used the product and are working from a line on a card statement with your trading name on it.
- Invoice requests are document requests: reissue with a tax number, address it to a different entity, resend to a shared inbox, and every one of them needs a person.
- Retry and dunning timing is genuinely publishable and genuinely unpublished, which is why the same failed card question arrives every month.
How it arrives
- why was i charged twice this month
- can you add our vat number to the invoice
- where do i download last year's invoices
- why is the amount different from last month
- we need the invoice addressed to our parent company
- how many times do you retry a failed card
What has to be indexed for this to work
| The billing policy you would actually enforce | Refund windows, proration rules, what a mid cycle upgrade does to the next statement, and the retry schedule on a failed card. Publish the version you enforce rather than the generous one, because the assistant will quote it back to somebody who then holds you to it. |
|---|---|
| Where invoices live inside the product | The exact path an admin follows to download a past invoice or update the billing details on it. A large share of these questions are self serve questions asked by somebody who could not find the screen, and naming the screen ends the conversation. |
| Tax handling by region | Whether listed prices include tax, which tax numbers you accept, what changes when one is added, and which regions you charge tax in at all. This is the question a finance team asks, and a wrong answer is repeated into an accounting system. |
| What happens when a payment fails | How many retries, over how many days, what notification goes out, when access is restricted and how it is restored. Every one of these is a fixed rule, and the anxiety underneath the question is whether the account is about to stop working. |
The reply
Two charges in the same month usually means an upgrade part way through the cycle: the original plan is billed on its normal date and the difference for the new plan is charged straight away, prorated for the days remaining. Past invoices are under Billing in the workspace settings, and the tax number can be added there so it appears on future documents. I cannot see your invoices or confirm what these two charges were, so if the amounts do not match that explanation, leave your name, your email and the dates and somebody will pull them up.
It gives the most likely documented explanation first and names the screen the visitor could not find, which resolves a good proportion of these outright. It then avoids the trap in the question, which is that the visitor wants a verdict on two specific amounts. Asking for the dates in the handover means the person who picks it up starts with the statement in front of them rather than sending a first email asking when.
Where it stops
The trigger. Any request to reissue, amend, refund or resend a document, or any question that requires reading an actual line on an account.
That one needs somebody who can open the account, which I cannot do from here. Leave your name, the email on the account and the dates or invoice numbers involved, and I will pass it to the team so they can look at the actual charges rather than the general rule.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- The amount a specific customer was charged, or what a specific line on their statement was for.
- That an invoice has been reissued, resent or corrected.
- That a refund has been processed, approved or is on its way.
- A tax treatment for a country that is not covered in your own published tax material.
Questions
- Most of our billing questions need account access anyway. Is this worth it?
- The volume splits more evenly than it feels. Retry schedules, proration rules, tax number handling and where to find an invoice are all answerable from policy and account settings, and together they are a large share of the queue. What is left genuinely needs a person, and it reaches them with the dates already attached.
- Can it at least confirm whether a payment went through?
- No. It cannot read billing state and should not reason its way towards an answer that sounds like it can. The honest version, which explains the retry rule and then hands over, is more useful than a confident guess and considerably safer than one that turns out wrong.
- Should we index our internal billing policy if it is not published?
- Only the parts you are willing to have quoted verbatim to a customer. Indexed material becomes answers, so an internal note saying refunds are usually granted if somebody pushes is a note you have now published to everybody who asks.
Keep reading
- Everything for a SaaS companyOne widget serves prospects, trialists and paying customers. What it can answer about plans and limits, and what has to reach a person.
- Handling billing and invoices in generalInvoice copies, tax numbers, purchase order references. Nearly all of it is account specific, so the honest handling is process plus a clean handover.
- A cancellation message is a retention conversation that has not happened yetThe assistant cancels nothing. It can be exact about notice, the last charge and what happens to data, then get a person into the conversation.
- A procurement reviewer working through a vendor assessment at speedMid deal a buyer's security team pastes control questions into chat. What can be cited, and why the spreadsheet stays somebody's job.
- The moment a subscription question turns into an account nobody can seeOn a subscription site the handover line is account visibility. What to collect in the message field, and why a second vague reply costs you.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.