Managed & offline billing

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Most customers pay self-serve through Mollie - card, automatic renewal, no human in the loop. Plenty don’t: public-sector bodies, larger organisations, anyone who needs a formal invoice and pays by bank transfer. For them, dembrane runs managed (offline) billing - staff issue the invoice, the customer pays out-of-band, staff record the payment.

This page covers that flow plus the payments rollup that reconciles it against real money.

It’s staff work. Issuing invoices and marking them paid touches real money - treat it like anything in finance. Customers can’t see or perform any of it; from their side they receive an invoice and pay it.

Setting an account to managed

Mark a billing account managed to flip it out of the self-serve Mollie path. It now classes as managed in the rollup, and the invoice/payment-link actions become available against it.

Note

Managed is a billing mode, not a tier. A managed account can be on any tier. It changes how they pay, not what they have.

Account managers

A managed account usually has a named account manager - a dembrane person who owns the commercial relationship. Assign or clear it from the account’s actions; the address must be a dembrane one (@dembrane.com). Paired with the admin contact on the rollup, you have both ends: who at dembrane owns it, and who at the customer to talk to.

For a managed account that could pay online but needs a nudge, issue a payment link - a one-off link the customer follows to pay. The middle ground between full self-serve and a formal invoice: you control when it goes out, but they still pay through the normal rails.

Issuing an invoice

For the formal route, issue an invoice - the document a finance department needs to release a bank transfer. It supports:

Issue it against the managed account at the agreed amount and tier, with the right VAT treatment, and send it.

Important

An issued invoice is unpaid until you say otherwise, and issuing it grants nothing on its own - it's a request for money. Combine it with the agreed tier so the customer has what they’re paying for, and mark it paid when the money lands.

Marking an invoice paid

When the bank transfer arrives, mark the invoice paid. This is the out-of-band reconciliation step: dembrane can’t know a transfer landed in the company bank account, so a human records it. Marking it paid moves the account into the paid state - what turns a managed account into genuine paying revenue in the rollup.

Warning

Only mark an invoice paid once you have confirmation the money arrived. This is the step the revenue numbers trust - marking unpaid invoices as paid inflates the rollup and the MRR forecast with money that isn’t there.

The payments rollup

The payments rollup is the view of what’s happened on the Mollie side: transactions and their statuses, with deep links into Mollie to open any transaction at source. Use it to:

Tip

The two views answer different questions. The billing rollup is “what should each account pay?”; the payments rollup is “what did arrive, through Mollie?”. A gap is usually an unpaid managed invoice or a failed Mollie charge.

The managed flow, end to end

  1. Set the account managed - flip it out of self-serve.
  2. Assign an account manager (@dembrane.com).
  3. Issue the invoice with the right VAT and, if needed, as an e-invoice.
  4. The customer pays by bank transfer out-of-band.
  5. Mark the invoice paid once the money is confirmed.
  6. Reconcile in the payments rollup and check the account now reads as paying.

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