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Zuora Billing

Zuora BillingZuora PaymentsZuora PlatformZuora CPQZephrZuora RevenueAccounts ReceivableRelease NotesBasicsEntitlementsSupport and policies
Zuora BillingZuora PaymentsZuora PlatformZuora CPQZephrZuora RevenueAccounts ReceivableRelease NotesBasicsEntitlementsSupport and policies

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Bill your customer

Commitments

Zuora Commitments is a native commitment management capability in Zuora that unifies all applicable charges into a single committed amount, tracks under-spend and overages over time, and gives Sales, Billing, Finance, and Customer Success a shared view of deal performance.

Companies increasingly sell subscriptions, usage, tokens, and services together in a single deal. Customers want to pay for what they consume, but consumption is highly variable, spiking during peak workflows, plateauing mid-year, or ramping unevenly across teams, particularly in the AI era. This volatility makes revenue unpredictable and forecasting difficult for businesses. It creates uncertainty for customers around spending and budgeting as well.

Without a native commitment model:

  • Sales teams negotiate minimum spend commitments in contracts that live somewhere else.

  • Billing Ops monitor hybrid transactions and manually generate true-up invoices outside the system of record, with no audit trail.

  • Finance tracks actual spend against committed amounts in spreadsheets, and reconcile later to follow where the deal stands.

  • Companies upsell credit-based usage products and know what was used, but not what the customer agreed to spend on the entire deal throughout the term.

Zuora Commitments brings commitment management natively into Zuora as a first-class object and the anchor of the deal. Once created, all applicable charges- subscriptions, usage, prepayment, and one-time fees contribute toward the same committed amount. Under-spend and overages are tracked over time. Teams across Sales, Billing, Finance, and Customer Success have a shared view of committed spend on the deal, without manual reconciliation. It enables SaaS and AI-native companies to evolve beyond the credit-only models, gives the finance team a way to run total monetization without sacrificing revenue predictability, and increases customer lifetime value.

Capabilities

  • Create and manage spend commitment contracts across multiple products, subscriptions, charge types, and customer accounts, natively.

  • Set a postpaid commitment. Zuora evaluates the customer’s actual billed spend against the committed amount and generates a true-up invoice for any shortfall. If the customer spends more than the committed amount, the overage is billed through the service charges in the usual way.

  • Set a prepaid commitment where customers pay upfront (or over an installment), and Zuora automatically settles the applicable service charge invoices with the prepayment.

  • Apply the commitment across multiple products, subscriptions, and charge types (one-time, recurring, usage, dynamic usage).

  • Spread commitment coverage across multiple accounts, such as usage on child accounts count toward a parent account’s commitment.

  • Configure flexible schedule structures- monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, annually, or custom date ranges with ramped committed amounts over time, and built-in proration for partial periods.

  • Manage the commitment lifecycle- amount update, extension, cancellation, with a full audit trail.

  • Track and report on the customer's billed spend against the commitment balance to monitor where the deal stands. Send threshold notifications and alerts, to support cross-sell/up-sell decisions and inform your customers.

Enablement

You can create and manage commitments through Zuora CPQ, the Billing UI, and using APIs:

  • CPQ: See Commitments in Zuora CPQ.

  • Billing UI: Navigate to Customers > Orders, create or open an order, and use the Commitments section to define the commitment, its schedules, applicable accounts, and charges.

  • Billing API: Use the Create an order API to create and manage commitments. Use the Commitment APIs to retrieve commitments, schedules, periods, and preview balance. For more information about the APIs, see the Zuora API Reference.

To enable Commitments on your Billing tenant, navigate to Settings > Billing > Manage Features and click Request Enablement for Commitments. Or submit a support ticket.

Prerequisites:

  • Commitments are created and managed via Order or Order Harmonization. You must be able to create and manage orders for the relevant accounts and products.

  • OTR, for Zuora Revenue customers.

  • Compatibility between Commitment and Billing Schedule, Split Invoice, and Owner Transfer is ongoing. Until supported, these features must to be turned off before turning on Commitment.

To enable prepayment on a commitment, submit a support ticket.

Last updated: May 26, 2026