AI Usage Periods & Credits
AI work is metered in documents: every file the OCR pipeline processes — every emailed invoice turned into a draft — draws one from your plan’s monthly allowance. This article explains the meter.
The metering model
- Monthly periods: usage counts within the calendar month and resets at the start of the next — each month is its own usage period, kept for history.
- Two numbers from your plan: a per-user-per-month figure (what the plan sizes for each licensed person) and the org-wide monthly cap — the hard total. The cap is what enforcement watches.
- What counts: documents processed by AI extraction — OCR intake, principally. Manual work never meters: type an invoice by hand and no credit moves.
Where the allowance comes from
Both numbers arrive with your licence key and display on the Subscription tab’s Plan Details card — for example, an AI plan might read Docs/User/Month 100 and Org-wide Doc Cap/Month 5000. Nothing about the meter is configured in the org: the plan sets it, the key delivers it, and changing it means a new key from REDA (activated in place, no downtime — see Licence Key Architecture).
The per-user figure is a sizing number — it tells you what the plan assumes each licensed person consumes. The org-wide cap is the enforcement number: one shared monthly pool for the whole org, all entities together. A quiet month for the UK team leaves more room for a busy month in India; the cap doesn’t partition.
Watching consumption
The Subscription tab’s Document Consumption card is the gauge: used this month, remaining, the cap, and a utilisation bar. A glance mid-month tells you whether the pace fits the plan.
Hitting the cap
AI processing pauses — new documents wait in the OCR Inbox rather than being lost — while everything manual continues untouched. The queue drains automatically when the month rolls over, or immediately after a plan upgrade. Chronic cap-bumping is a sizing conversation with REDA, and the consumption history is your evidence.
Common mistakes to avoid
| Mistake | Why it hurts | Do this instead |
|---|---|---|
| Sizing the plan to an average month | Intake isn’t flat — year-end and audit-season spikes hit the cap exactly when the volume matters | Size to the busiest month; the consumption history is your evidence |
| Retrying failed documents blind | Every AI pass meters — re-running a blurry scan five times spends five documents on the same failure | Read the failure reason in the OCR Inbox first, fix the cause, then retry once |
| Never glancing at the gauge until something stops | The cap arrives as a surprise mid-close instead of a mid-month observation | Make the Document Consumption card part of the monthly admin glance |
| Treating the per-user figure as a per-user limit | You’ll “ration” users against a number that isn’t enforced per person — the org-wide cap is what enforcement watches | Read per-user as plan sizing; watch the org-wide cap as the real boundary |
| Routing documents through OCR that arrive as clean data anyway | Structured imports and manual entry are free — spending AI documents on them wastes the allowance | Reserve the meter for what AI extraction is for: unstructured scans and emailed PDFs |
Where to go next
- OCR Overview — where the documents go.
- Plan Tiers — allowances by tier.
- Subscription Tab — the Plan Details and Document Consumption cards.
Frequently asked questions
A reprocess is another AI pass, so it meters again — one more reason the inbox shows failure reasons before you retry. Fix the cause (a blurry scan, a missing vendor) rather than re-running blind.
No — the allowance is monthly, use-it-or-lose-it, which is what makes the cap predictable for both sides. Size the plan to your busiest months.
Never. The meter counts one thing: documents processed through AI extraction. Everything manual — data entry, posting, reporting, exports — is unmetered on every plan.
The whole org — it’s the org-wide monthly cap on the Plan Details card. All entities draw from the same pool, which means quiet entities leave headroom for busy ones.
Through REDA — allowances are plan facts delivered by the licence key, not settings you can edit. A plan change arrives as a new key; activate it on the Subscription tab and the new caps apply in place.
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