We fixed some bugs in our billing system that were creating invalid credits and refund requests depending upon the sequence with which Account Owners were adding or removing subscriptions quickly.

For folks who are currently using all their subscriptions and want to change a member of their Account Team, it’s important to remember to first remove the old member before you add a new person: otherwise your Account Team will temporarily be larger than the subscriptions purchased, and this could result in a new invoice being generated automatically.

We have improved the invoices generated by Kerika, for both online and offline billing, to include a full listing of the Account Team to make it easier for the finance/purchasing departments of our customers to track changes made to Board Teams and the Account Team.

Here’s an example:

For each person who is currently part of the Account Team, Kerika will list their name, email, role and Invited On and Joined Team dates.

Invited On is the date on which someone was added to a Board Team or the Account Team; this is also the date on which one of the Account’s free subscriptions is used up — or the Account Owner is prompted to purchase an additional subscription, if no free subscriptions remain for that Account.

Joined On is the date on which the invitation was actually accepted by the new team member, which, hopefully, is really close to the Invited Team. (Otherwise the Account is wasting days on a used subscription.)

Role is the highest role a person occupies within an Account, across all the boards where the user is part of the team. If a user is a Team Member on some boards and a Visitor on others, that person’s role will be listed as Team Member.

As Kerika gets adopted by large organizations, we were seeing a disconnect between the active users who were making decisions about adding or removing people from their teams, and the finance/purchasing departments within the same organizations who were being asked to approve invoices. This change fixes that disconnect.

A Kerika Account can own an unlimited number of boards, of any type, and each board can have it’s own team consisting of Board Admins, Team Members, and Visitors.

Users with a Professional Account have a defined size to their Account Teams, directly related to the number of subscriptions they have purchased so far.

Some users prefer to buy a few more subscriptions than they currently need to provide an extra buffer to make it easier to quickly their project teams. Others try to buy just as much as they need, and no more.

If your Account has unused subscriptions, then it’s easy for any Board Admin to add someone to their board, simply by inviting them to join a particular board.

This uses up one of the free subscriptions in that Account, and the Account Owner is notified.

If there are no free subscriptions, Kerika doesn’t immediately block the Board Admin from adding someone to their team. Kerika allows for the new person to join immediately as a new Team Member, but the Account Owner is immediately alerted that they need to buy an additional subscription. This alert comes as email, and as an in-app message:

This starts a 30-day grace period to give the Account Owner time to process the purchase; some organizations have complex approval processes even for something as inexpensive as Kerika!

If the Account Owner doesn’t complete the purchase within 30 days, the newly added Team Member is demoted to Visitor: this means they can still have real-time access to their board, but they can’t make any changes or be assigned any work items.

Clicking on the BUY SUBSCRIPTION button will bring up this dialog:

If the Account Owner is expecting a bunch of these notifications in the future, they can buy more than the one subscription they have been prompted for; they can also decide whether they want to automatically renew their subscriptions when they expire.

A confirmation screen is shown, with tax calculated based upon whether the buyer is located in Washington State or not, and the Account Owner is given the option of either completing the purchase online, using a credit card that is processed by Stripe, or paying offline.

(Not: Kerika never sees any credit card details. All of the online payment processing is handled by Stripe.)

In larger companies there may be restrictions on who can make online purchases (or even who has access to a corporate credit card), and to accommodate these customers we offer the option of requesting an invoice.

If you choose an invoice, you get a confirmation like this:

And within seconds the invoice will land in your email Inbox, and those of anyone else who has been specified as a Billing Contact on your account. Kerika invoices look like this:

We spent months, earlier this year, designing and building this system trying to make sure we offer all the flexibility that our customers may need. Since we have users around the world, that was an interestingly tough challenge!

If you have any suggestions on how we could improve this, let us know.