, by Raphael Luba

New in Fabman: Credits, credits, credits (and more)

One of the most requested features has been to grant members recurring credits for bookings or machine usage. It took us a while, but today we are finally releasing The Big Credits Update!

We’ve also added an easier way for members to pay invoices, enabled API key management right from the admin app, and more!

Recurring and one-time credits for bookings or machine usage

Starting today, you can include credits with every package you offer. Credits give you lots of ways to tinker with pricing and tweak your business model:

If you want to get started, go to your package settings, click on the new “Credits” menu item, and add one or more credits:

Add any number of credits to your packages.

You can also add one-time credits to packages, for example, to help new users get started.

For more information go and read our help page for package credits.

Individual credits

But you don’t have to go through packages to grant credits. You can also go directly to a member’s “Credits” tab to give them one-time credits.

Keeping track of credits usage

On each member’s “Credits” tab you can see their current and past credits. Click on the usage bar of any credit and you’ll see every booking or activity it was used on.

You can always see what a credit was used for.

Charging for bookings when they happen

For bookings to better interact with credits, we had to change when Fabman charges members for bookings.

Until now, as soon as a member booked a machine or room, Fabman created the corresponding charges. But this can cause unexpected and undesired results, for example, when people book multiple time-slots and then cancel some of them. It also doesn’t work well when members have daily/weekly/monthly credits but want to book a date past the current credit period.

To fix this, Fabman now tries to charge members for bookings right after the booking’s end-time. First, Fabman will be using their available credits. Then it will charge them for the remaining amount (if any). As a side benefit, these new charging rules also avoid multiple charges or refunds per booking whenever members extend or shorten a booking before it happens.

Credits and members who require upfront payment

At least for now, credits are not considered when Fabman checks if a prepaid member (i.e., a member for whom you’ve enabled “require upfront payment”) can book equipment or turn on a machine. Prepaid members still need to have enough balance for all of their actions. Check Fabman’s help pages for details.

Do you want to get paid for an invoice but don’t have the member’s credit card details? If you’ve connected your space to a Stripe account, you can now request payment for any invoice by sending the member a link. Just go to the invoice’s page and click on “Request payment via link”:

Request payment for an invoice by sending members a link.

Fabman will create a payment link that you can forward to the member however you like. You can send them a quick e-mail directly from the admin app or copy and paste the link to whatever app you use to reach your members:

Send them the payment link however you like.

When they open the link, they can enter their card information (or use the one you already have on file) to pay the invoice:

And they can pay it with their credit card and save it for next time.

Manage API keys in the admin app

You can finally manage your Fabman API keys right from the admin app:

Manage your API keys from the integrations page.

Before that, you had to use our interactive API documentation page or something like cURL to create or change an API key. (Which sucked, to be honest.)

I hope this improvement encourages even more people to experiment with our API and develop clever extensions and integrations.

Other changes

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