Invoices & Billing Concepts

Invoices & Billing Concepts

This page covers the concepts behind your SIPSTACK bill. For the hands-on guide to the Billing page itself — viewing and paying invoices, reading the line items and tax breakdown, managing cards and autopay — see Account → Billing.

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Billing Cycle

Each subscription bills on its own anchor date — the day of the month it was first activated (or the day its trial converted). On that date an invoice is generated for the upcoming period and, on most accounts, charged automatically to your default card (autopay). If you hold multiple subscriptions started on different dates, each renews on its own cycle; the next bill date for each is shown on Account → Subscriptions.

Annual-prepay subscriptions work the same way with a yearly anchor.

What’s on an Invoice

A typical invoice contains:

• Subscription fees — one line per product/plan for the period (with seat quantity on per-seat plans).
• Usage and overage — metered consumption beyond your included allowances: voice minutes and SMS (outbound and inbound). See Usage & Limits. Aura AI usage is not invoiced here — it draws from your separate prepaid Aura balance; a prepaid top-up purchase may appear as its own line, but Aura usage itself is never billed as invoice overage.
• Add-ons — additional phone numbers, hardware, one-time professional services.
• Proration lines — partial-period charges or credits from mid-cycle changes (below).
• Taxes — itemized by type and rate. Canadian accounts are charged GST/HST/PST based on your province; the invoice preview and PDF show the full tax breakdown.
• Credits — promotional or account credits are applied automatically and reduce the amount due.

Currencies

Every invoice is denominated in your account’s billing currency — CAD or USD — set when the account was created. Accounts migrated from legacy systems can carry a mix of CAD- and USD-denominated subscriptions and invoices; the Billing page labels every amount with its currency.

Proration

• Upgrades and seat additions apply immediately; you’re charged a prorated amount for the remainder of the current period, then the full new rate from the next renewal.
• Downgrades and seat removals take effect at the next renewal — no mid-cycle charge.

Payment Methods & Failed Payments

Credit and debit cards are managed on Account → Billing (cards are tokenized by our payment processor; SIPSTACK never stores card numbers). Enterprise accounts can arrange ACH or invoice/net-terms billing through sales.

If a charge fails, the subscription enters past due — service keeps running while payment is retried and reminders escalate. The full timeline, including when suspension can occur and how to resolve it, is on Subscription Lifecycle.

Tip

Need a copy for bookkeeping? Every invoice has a downloadable PDF with your organization’s legal name, line items, and the tax breakdown — see viewing and downloading invoices.

Billing Notifications

Billing events don’t only show up on the Billing page — several of them also raise a notification. Every notification type is its own row in Profile → Notifications in Switchboard, with a master On switch and three per-channel switches: Desktop pop-ups, Mobile push, and Email. You can silence or re-route one row without touching any of the others.

The Bell column on each row is a read-only indicator, not a switch — it mirrors the master switch, because the bell entry is the system of record for the event. You can turn email off and keep the bell, but not the other way round.

Three of them cover money coming back to you, or an automatic top-up stopping.

What each one means

Notification	What triggers it	Severity
Payment refunded	A payment on your account was refunded to the card that paid it. It fires for refunds SIPSTACK issues and for refunds raised directly in our payment processor, and the notice names the amount returned.	Info
Card hold released	A temporary card authorization was released without ever being charged — the hold-first outcome of a refused 10DLC registration. Only some accounts are on the hold-first path; see Refunds and released holds below. The notice says the amount and that you were not charged.	Info
Aura auto-reload stopped — monthly limit reached	Aura prepaid auto-reload hit its cap on how many top-ups it will run in a single calendar month, and has stopped for the rest of the month. The notice names how many top-ups were used and what the cap is. Your current credit balance is in the accompanying email, not in the in-app notice.	Critical

Refunds and released holds

A refund and a released hold are two different things. A refund means money left your card and came back. A released hold means the money never left — the authorization reduced your available balance for a short time and was then cancelled, so no charge appears on your statement.

Which of the two you get is not a setting you choose. It is decided per charge, and today it applies to 10DLC registration fees: the fee is collected before anything is sent to the registry, and returned if the registry refuses the submission.

• Charge, then refund — the common path. Your card is charged the fee up front. If the registry refuses the submission, that charge is refunded. Both the charge and the refund appear on your statement, a few days apart. This raises Payment refunded.
• Hold, then release. If your organization’s default card has already paid an invoice or a subscription renewal, the fee is placed as a temporary authorization instead of a charge, and captured only if the registry accepts. A refused submission releases the hold. This raises Card hold released.

The test is per card, not per account, so replacing your card resets it — the next registration on a brand-new card goes back to charge-then-refund. Charge-then-refund is also the fallback whenever a prior completed payment on that exact card can’t be confirmed. Either way you end up whole; the only difference is whether a charge shows up on your statement in the meantime.

Who receives them, and where

All three go to your organization’s billing audience: every active member whose role on the organization is owner, admin, or billing, plus any user individually granted billing access. Deactivated memberships, deactivated or deleted users, partner and contact memberships (even one granted billing access), and SIPSTACK staff accounts are all excluded.

Notification	Bell	Desktop pop-up	Mobile push	Email
Payment refunded	Yes	No	No	Yes — but see the note below
Card hold released	Yes	No	No	Yes — but see the note below
Aura auto-reload stopped	Yes	Yes	No	Yes

The Email column is each notification’s own email channel — the switch on its row in Profile → Notifications. It is not the same thing as the refund confirmation the billing system sends to your organization’s billing contact, which has its own switch (see below).

Two of these email channels aren’t wired up yet

Payment refunded and Card hold released both default to email on, but neither type sends mail through that channel today — there is no email behind either of them yet. What actually reaches you:

• A refund still reaches you by email — through the separate refund confirmation to your billing contact, not through this row.
• A released hold reaches you in the Switchboard bell only.

Both switches are already in place and will start delivering when the emails do. Aura auto-reload stopped does send through its channel.

Those defaults follow your SIPSTACK account role — the Role column on Account → Users, which reads either Owner or User. That is not the same thing as your role on the organization, which is what decides the audience above, and the difference decides whether you get anything at all:

• Account role Owner → the defaults in the table.
• Account role User → all three rows start switched off, master switch included. Someone who is an owner of the organization but whose account role is User is in the audience yet receives nothing — no email, and no bell entry either — until they turn a row on in Profile → Notifications.

Mobile push is off for all three. These are account-level billing events rather than something that needs to interrupt you on your phone, so they arrive in the Switchboard bell and, where an email is wired up, by email.

A Desktop pop-up additionally needs notification permission from your browser. Switchboard shows a banner on Profile → Notifications when you have the channel switched on but have not granted it; until you do, the switch is on and no pop-up appears.

The Severity column above shows up as a badge when you open View all from the bell — but only on Warning and Critical notifications, and the severity filter chips there offer only those two. Payment refunded and Card hold released are Info: no badge, and no way to filter the list down to them. Only Aura auto-reload stopped is Critical, so only it carries a badge and can be filtered.

Auto-reload stopping is not a warning — it has already stopped

The Aura auto-reload stopped notice is Critical because by the time it fires, two things are already true: your credit balance is below the threshold that triggers a top-up, and auto-reload will not run again until the next calendar month. Aura stops drawing credits at a zero balance, so credit-burning AI features — voice-agent calls, call-recording transcription, premium text-to-speech — will pause once the remaining balance runs out.

Top up the prepaid balance manually from Account → Billing to keep them running. Raising your top-up amount so each reload lasts longer is what stops it recurring next month. See How Aura AI Usage & Credits Work.

Muting or re-routing them

Open Profile → Notifications in Switchboard, find the row, and set the master switch and the per-channel switches you want. Turning the master switch off stops that notification for you everywhere — no bell entry, no pop-up, and no email either (the separate refund confirmation below is not affected) — and leaves every other billing notification untouched. To keep the bell entry but stop the mail, leave the master switch on and turn just the Email switch off. These are your own preferences; muting a row does not mute it for anyone else on the account.

The refund confirmation email is separate

Alongside the Payment refunded notification, the billing system sends a refund confirmation email to your organization’s billing contact. It is not governed by your personal notification preferences: muting the Payment refunded row stops your bell entry, but the confirmation still goes out, so the account keeps a record that the money came back.

It does have its own switch, just not on your row. It follows the billing email preference belonging to whichever user account matches the address set as the organization’s billing contact — so it is turned off by turning billing emails off on that account. If the organization has no billing contact set, or the address doesn’t match a user on the account, the email always sends. Ask support if you’re not sure which account holds it.