Billing & Dashboards

The form where somebody stops being a visitor and becomes a paying customer. It has to price correctly in their currency, apply the right promotion, screen for fraud, and be wrong about none of it.

GoCart took every sale A2 Hosting made for sixteen months and kept no database of its own, so every price a customer saw came from the system that was going to charge them. The sequence is create, then check, then charge: an order that exists and has not been charged is a support ticket, while a card charged against an order that should not exist is a refund, a chargeback, and a conversation with a processor. Its pricing endpoint finds the best live promotion across the whole cart without the customer typing a code.

Renewals, invoices, and the billing run that has to be right every night without anybody watching it.

Helix moved an order from open to submitted to invoiced to paid as explicit state transitions, so a checkout that failed partway stopped at its last good state and resumed instead of unwinding. Invoices could be paid from account credit without touching a gateway, and charging respected account state — an account frozen or awaiting review was skipped with a logged reason rather than quietly charged. We bill our own platform through Recurly — checkout, renewals, and upgrades — and open-sourced the CLI we run it with. We have built metered pricing in Helix and in Synco, the Site5 billing system Wormhole emptied into it, though most of what we have billed settled on flat recurring.

Declines, retries, refunds, credits, and voids. Every one of them ends in a conversation with a customer, so the system has to be able to explain itself.

Refunds, voids, credits, and coupons were modeled explicitly in Helix rather than as adjustments to a balance, and we carried a fork of the payment library to add refunding against a stored card token on the older gateway — a patched dependency taken on knowingly rather than redesigning refunds around a gap in it. When GoCart could not charge the card it still returned success with the underlying message attached, because the order existed and saying otherwise would have been a lie that lost a real sale.

One deployment billing on behalf of several companies, in more than one currency, through different merchant accounts — and every partner able to audit their own numbers.

Each Helix brand carried its own encrypted gateway credentials, and a separate record mapped currency to merchant account, so the same code charging the same card routed through a different merchant depending on whose storefront the customer had walked in through. Amounts were a type rather than a float, each one carrying its currency. Partner economics lived in the schema — payout records, per-service calculations, and a ledger — because a partner reselling your platform is entitled to a number they can check.

Changing processors, or moving customers onto a different billing system, without anyone noticing. Once a card has been charged there is no rollback, because the outside world has already changed.

Both gateways ran live at once while Helix moved from Vantiv to Braintree across every brand, selecting per brand on which credentials were configured, and without interrupting active billing for anyone. Wormhole moved roughly ten thousand customers off three legacy installs, one brand per announced window, reconciled on account counts, balances, and recurring revenue.

The reporting on top: what sold, what was refunded, what a partner is owed, and which orders a human needs to look at.

The admin application in Helix carried order review, fraud triage, financial reporting, and refunds, and its partner panel let partners pull their own revenue reports against the same ledger that calculated their payouts. Reporting that disagrees with the billing run is worse than no reporting, so both read the same models.