Billing Pipeline Integrity Sprint
For usage-based SaaS, AI infrastructure, cloud and infrastructure companies, and any business whose billing runs through several systems.
Every system works. The pipeline still gets it wrong.
A usage charge passes through several systems before it reaches your books. Each can do its own job correctly while the handoffs between them lose, repeat or misprice data. Typical causes:
- Missing events
- Duplicate events
- Retries that are not idempotent
- Late events landing in the wrong period
- Usage attributed to the wrong customer
- Aggregation errors
- Pricing and rating errors
- Credits applied incorrectly
- Invoices that do not match rated usage
- Differences between billing and the ERP
Product and operational events
Check: emitted once per action
Usage and metering
Check: aggregated per customer and period
Pricing
Check: rated at the contracted price
Billing platform
Check: credits and plans applied
Invoice
Check: lines equal rated usage
ERP and finance
Check: revenue matches invoices
The sprint
One important boundary. For example: usage events → billable usage → your billing platform, such as Stripe.
Read-only by default. We start from read-only access, exports, historical samples or anonymised identifiers. Write access to production is normally not needed.
The acceptance principle. Every item in the chosen sample either reconciles or appears as an explicit, explained exception. Nothing is left unaccounted for.
Starting engagement
$5,000, fixed scope
Seven days. One boundary. Output you keep.
- Day 1
Choose the boundary
Agree the one boundary that matters most and the sample to test — a period, a set of customers, a product line.
- Day 2
Get the data
Read-only access, exports or historical samples. Customer identifiers can be anonymised.
- Day 3
Write the rules
Define what 'correct' means at this boundary, as rules that can be checked.
- Day 4
Build the harness
Match both sides record by record and run the rules.
- Day 5
Explain every exception
Classify each difference and trace it to a cause.
- Day 6
Harden
Tests, re-runnable scripts, and a runbook.
- Day 7
Hand over
Walk through the findings and the code with your team.
What you receive
- Reconciliation harness
- Code that compares both sides of the boundary, record by record, and runs again whenever you need it.
- Deterministic integrity rules
- Each rule written down and encoded, so the same input always gives the same verdict.
- Automated tests
- Tests for the rules themselves, so the harness can be trusted and changed.
- Missing and duplicate detection
- Events absent on one side, or present more than once, identified by key.
- Exception dataset
- Every item that does not reconcile, with the rule it failed and the evidence.
- Traceability
- From any invoice line back to the events it was built from.
- Reusable queries and scripts
- Yours to keep and run inside your own environment.
- Findings and runbook
- What we found, what likely causes it, and how to run the harness after we leave.
Know which boundary worries you?
Tell us about the systems in your billing pipeline and where the numbers stop agreeing. We will tell you whether a sprint fits and what it would test.