In Metronome, customers are the recipients of an invoice and may represent individual users, enterprises, API keys, or whatever specification your organization needs. This guide describes how to create a customer in Metronome. Creating your customer includes creating the customer object and configuring the optional associated billing configurations.
INFOA customer needs at least one contract provisioned to start rating for billing. You can also configure multiple contracts per customer, if needed.

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Create a customer​

Create an individual customer object in Metronome or build a flow to create customers programmatically from system triggers.

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Understand ingest aliases​

Ingest aliases map your internal customer identifiers to Metronome’s customer ID. When you send usage keyed on an ingest alias, Metronome automatically associates it to the correct Metronome customer. This allows you to maintain your existing customer entities without needing to swap in a Metronome customer ID. Ingest aliases can also be used to maintain account hierarchy. Enterprise customers often have sub-organizations that roll up to a single contract. Use ingest aliases to model this. For example, you can represent the enterprise organization as a customer in Metronome, with each sub-organization represented by an ingest alias attached to that customer: 
Parent Account - Metronome Customer e7f893e5-07f7-483b-8c16-6905944c6a89  
  + Sub-Org 1 - IngestAlias1  
  + Sub-Org 2 - IngestAlias2  
  + Sub-Org 3 - IngestAlias3  
  + Sub-Org 4 - IngestAlias4
You can split out each sub-organization’s usage on the invoice Metronome generates. Learn how to use group keys to modify invoice presentation. Ingest aliases can be specified on the Metronome customer object at time of creation or any point after. Retroactively adding an ingest alias on the customer is a way to take Metronome out of the hot path of customer signup while properly metering usage. For example, if you first send usage keyed on IngestAlias1 and later add this ingest alias to an existing customer, Metronome retroactively associates that usage to the correct customer.

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Create a customer with the Metronome app​

To create a customer using the app:
  1. Go to the Customers page → Add a customer.
  2. Add a name.
  3. Add an ingest alias.
  4. (Optional) Set a custom field for the customer on the Settings tab.

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Build a customer creation flow with the API​

Use the Metronome API to build a flow for creating customers in Metronome programmatically based on sales-led or product-led motions. For a sales-led motion, you might use Salesforce CPQ to capture opportunities. When an opportunity closes, you can schedule a job to create a customer using the Metronome API. This example request shows how to:
  • Create a mock customer, WidgetsExpress, in Metronome
  • Codify the relationship between the Metronome customer and the SFDC account by storing the sfdc_account_id in a custom field 
curl https://api.metronome.com/v1/customers \  
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <TOKEN>" \  
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \  
  -d '{  
    "ingest_aliases": [  
      "team@widgetsexpress.com"  
    ],  
    "name": "WidgetsExpress",  
    "custom_fields": {  
      "sfdc_account_id": "sfdc1001"  
    }  
  }'
For a product-led growth motion, create a similar workflow where the trigger originates from a signup on your website. Store the relationship between the Metronome customer and your internal customer object.