How-to
OCR allowance, PAYG, and what happens at the cap
How your monthly OCR quota works per Finance tier, what happens during trial, what happens when you hit the cap, and how PAYG overage is billed.
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What it does
Every Finance tier includes a monthly OCR allowance — a fixed number of bill captures you can run for free per calendar month. The counter resets on the 1st. Per-tier allowance + PAYG rate:
| Tier | Monthly | OCR allowance | PAYG rate / page |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | — | 0 | n/a |
| Sole Trader | £14 | 25 | 8p |
| Business | £29 | 100 | 5p |
| Growth | £59 | 500 | 4p |
| Group | £99 | 2,000 | 3p |
Trial allowance. While your subscription is on trial, you get the Sole Trader allowance (25 pages/month) regardless of which paid tier you eventually plan to subscribe to. It's a deliberately generous taste — enough to genuinely test bill capture — but not enough to run a whole business on, so the trial doesn't become a perpetual free ride. When the trial ends, the allowance flips to whichever tier you subscribed to (or to 0 if you didn't subscribe).
What happens at the cap
Behaviour at the cap depends on two settings on Settings → Bill capture:
- PAYG disabled (default): once the allowance is spent, further captures are blocked with a clear message. New email-in bills land as drafts with the attachment but no parsed fields. You either wait for the next month or upgrade.
- PAYG enabled: captures continue past the allowance, each one billed at your tier's PAYG rate. An optional monthly cap sets a hard ceiling on overage — once the month's PAYG accrual hits the cap, behaviour reverts to blocked.
PAYG counts roll up daily to Stripe via metered billing
(action='set' for idempotency), so a retry won't double-bill you.
How to use it
- Open Settings → Bill capture. The header shows this month's used count + tier + PAYG count + estimated PAYG charges.
- Decide on PAYG. If your volume is steady and predictable, leaving it disabled is safer — the cap is a hard stop.
- If you enable PAYG, set a monthly cap to something you'd be comfortable seeing on the invoice. Without a cap there's no ceiling.
- Watch your inbox for threshold reminder emails — they fire at 50%, 80%, 95%, and 100% of your allowance, plus £10 of PAYG accrual, plus 80% and 100% of your monthly cap.
- If you hit the wall with PAYG disabled, you can either upgrade tier (allowance jumps immediately) or flip PAYG on for the rest of the month.
- At month-end the counters zero out. The Stripe invoice picks up any PAYG overage from the daily roll-up.
Tips
- Don't enable PAYG without a monthly cap unless you trust the volume estimate. There's no hard ceiling once enabled.
- The reminder emails go to your billing contact, not every tenant admin. Update Settings → Billing → Billing contact if that's not who you want.
- Reuploads of the same PDF still count — OCR runs each time. Re-run only if you need to.
- The daily Stripe roll-up uses
action='set', so re-running the cron won't double-bill. Safe to retry if it failed. - Upgrading mid-month is pro-rated by Stripe; the new tier's allowance applies immediately. The used count carries over but the ceiling rises.