Nectar

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What Nectar does

Plans, seats and usage turned into invoices that show every line’s calculation, and what happens to them after they are issued.

Nectar is free, open source subscription billing for a B2B software or service business. It turns monthly plans, seats and metered usage into invoices where every line shows how it was calculated, then tracks credits, payments and overdue follow-up. It is MIT licensed, and it runs on your own computer or your own Cloudflare account.

Who it is for

One US business that bills its customers monthly in US dollars: a flat plan, seats, usage of a meter, or a mix of the three. Usually an owner and a finance operator run it, with an outside accountant who reads and exports.

How a month works

  1. Prices and customers. You keep a catalog of products and prices, and your customers under the ids your CRM or previous biller already uses.
  2. Subscriptions. Each customer's subscription names its prices, seats, billing day and any contract exception (a discount, a one-time credit or a contract price), which bills only after a person approves it.
  3. Usage. Usage arrives as a CSV file or from your metering pipeline. Before anything is rated you can see each period's exact totals, the days without usage and anything that arrived late.
  4. The bill run. For a month, Nectar drafts one invoice per ended period, compares each with the customer's previous invoice and the run with last month's, and lists anything unusual.
  5. Approval. A person approves the drafts. Approval names the exact inputs: if usage, a price, a contract term or the tax policy changes before finalising, the approval no longer holds.
  6. Finalising. Approved invoices are numbered in order (INV-000001 upward) and never change. Corrections are credit notes.
  7. After the invoice. Payments you received are recorded with their reference and allocated, ageing shows who owes what, and reminders are drafted for you to send from your own mail.

Every line explained

Each invoice line keeps its rule, quantity and unit price. A usage line reads like this:

ChargeQuantityUnitAmount
Event processing (v1)3,346,778.5$0.0004$1,338.71

Rule: sum of event quantities × unit, rounded half away from zero once.

Money is exact: prices and quantities are exact decimals, and each line is rounded once to whole cents. The same inputs always give the same bill, and every invoice records the rule version (nectar-rating-1) and a fingerprint of its inputs.

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