Reviewing usage

In short

• Answer “what did this client job cost us” without exporting anything
• Open the usage page for three views: your own spend, the team’s, and your account’s lifetime outlay (The three views)
• The team view breaks spend down by person and by media type, which is what you need when the work is billed on
• Spend counts only what was actually charged. Failed and canceled jobs appear beside it as returns (Why returns are not subtracted)
• Credits held for a job still running are not spend, so work in flight never reads as money gone
• Every screen reads the same ledger, so the team view and your membership page always agree (One reader)

The three views

Personal is what you spent on your own work: the rows carrying no team.

Team is what the team spent, grouped by member, so an owner funding the work can see where it went and who it went to. It also breaks down by media type, so “video took most of it” is answerable without exporting anything.

Lifetime spent, on your membership page, is everything your account has paid for: your own work and any team work you did. It is the account’s outlay, whoever it was for.

Why returns are not subtracted

This is the part worth understanding, because the arithmetic looks wrong until you know the shape of the ledger.

A reservation writes nothing. When a job starts, credits move out of your available balance and no ledger row is created. When the job finishes, the charge is written, already net of anything the job did not use (a composition that finishes only some of its shots also writes a return for the rest). When a job fails or is canceled, one row is written: the return, the reservation coming back, money that was never charged.

So returns are not the inverse of charges. Subtracting them would understate what you spent. A month with one failed 300-credit job and one successful 100-credit job would read as −200, which is nonsense.

Spend is therefore the sum of charges, and returns are reported alongside (the app calls them Reservations returned). Your lifetime-spent counter is built the same way, so the number on your membership page and the number in the team view agree by construction rather than by luck.

One reader, so the numbers cannot disagree

Every surface that shows spend (usage, the team view, membership) reads through a single piece of code over a single ledger. This is deliberate: the alternative is two readers that drift, and then a support conversation about which screen is right.

What to read next

• Managing the team — seats, roles and the cap.
• How do Teams work? — the shape of a team and what it is for.