Billing, upgrades, and invoices
This article is about your Accolade subscription — the plan you pay us for. If you are looking for invoicing your sponsors and suppliers, that is a different thing entirely and lives in Finance and invoicing.
What the product currently does, plainly
Read this before the steps, because the honest answer saves you a support ticket.
Setup → Settings & Branding → Billing & Plans exists as a tab, and it tells you the truth about your workspace: whether a billing relationship is stored against it and whether a payment method is held. It is deliberately not a self-service billing console. An earlier version of that tab showed a saved card, a plan price and a billing history that had never existed for anybody, which is exactly the kind of screen a finance lead acts on — so it was removed rather than dressed up.
Payment itself runs through Stripe. Stripe holds the card, handles 3-D Secure, issues the receipt and is where a subscription is actually cancelled. Accolade does not store your card number at any point.
How you pay
Card payments go through Stripe Checkout. Enterprise and Agency contracts above £20k a year can pay by invoice instead — BACS or wire — which is arranged with us rather than in the app. Annual billing is 12 months up front for 20% off, and it is set when the subscription is created.
Upgrading
- Decide the tier from the pricing page or what each plan includes. Upgrading is the way you unlock modules, not a setting: if a module is not in the rail, it is not in your plan.
- Email support@accolade.live with the plan you want and whether you want monthly or annual, or start the checkout from the plan prompt when you hit a limit.
- You will be sent to Stripe Checkout. Complete it there.
- Come back to your workspace. The plan on the record changes and the modules the new tier includes appear in the rail.
Your first reply on that email is within 1 business day on Professional, 4 business hours on Enterprise and 1 business hour on Agency. On Free there is no written target — the published targets are on /support.
Downgrading
Ask us the same way. A downgrade takes effect at the end of the current billing period rather than immediately, and we will tell you first if your current usage would exceed the lower plan's limits — seats, events and guests are the three that usually bite. Data is not deleted by a downgrade; modules outside the lower tier stop being available.
Invoices and receipts
Every card payment produces a receipt from Stripe, sent to the billing email on the subscription. Where a Stripe customer record is linked to your workspace, we can open the Stripe billing portal for that record, which is where the payment method is changed and past invoices are downloaded. If no Stripe customer is linked — which is the case for any workspace that has never paid — that portal cannot be opened, and the app will say so rather than fail silently. Invoiced customers are billed directly and their invoices come from us, not from Stripe.
Make sure your company details are right before the first invoice: Setup → Settings & Branding → Organisation Profile holds Organisation Name, Legal Entity Name, Company Registration No., VAT Number and the address. Those are the details that appear on paperwork.
Annual billing
Paying 12 months up front takes 20% off. Switching an existing monthly subscription to annual is done at renewal — email support and we will set it up so you are not charged twice in the same month.
Common problems
- "No Stripe customer linked." That workspace has no payment relationship yet. It is the expected answer on Free, and on any account set up manually. Email support and we will link it.
- The Billing & Plans tab looks empty. It is showing you that no payment method is held for this workspace. That is a statement, not a loading failure.
- You upgraded and the new modules have not appeared. Sign out and back in; the module list is read when your session starts.
- The invoice has the wrong company name or VAT number. Fix Organisation Profile first, then ask us to reissue — a reissued invoice takes the details as they are at the time it is generated.
- You want to stop paying. See Cancelling or pausing your subscription. Cancelling is not the same as deleting your data, and neither happens by accident.