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Open an account and choose Billing. Four cards: what the account holds, how to add to it, whether the credit adds up, and every movement.
Adding credit cannot be undone from the panel. There is no “remove credit” and no reversal. Undoing a top-up would need a negative adjustment entry, and that does not exist.The form asks you to confirm the amount and the reference before it writes. Read the confirmation rather than clicking through it — it is the last point at which the number is still yours to change.

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What the account holds

Prepaid accounts show Available. Postpaid accounts show a Credit limit — what they may run up before the gateway refuses them, which is the same refusal a prepaid account gets when it runs out. The two are never given the same name.
Reserved is not a hold that shrinks as messages go out. It is credit that has been moved out of the balance, and it only ever grows until it is released.Seeing it climb on a busy account is correct. Seeing it sit on an idle one means credit was stranded by an unclean stop, and it is returned by releasing held credit — nothing is lost either way, because balance plus reserved is conserved.
A missing balance row reads as No balance row — not zero, absent, which is a different and more consequential state: a top-up against an account with no row is left pending rather than credited. Open for credit creates the row at zero. Currency is not asked for. There is one currency per platform, taken from the gateway, and FireFlo never converts — a balance in anything else could never be spent against a price. The field appears only when the panel cannot read the platform currency at all.

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Adding credit

Three fields: Amount, Reference, and an optional Note. Once a valid amount is typed the form echoes back exactly what will be stored, because money is held to four decimal places and a misplaced decimal is the expensive mistake here.
The reference is the replay guard, not a memo. A receipt or transaction id is what stops the same payment being credited twice, and the database can only enforce that when it is set.It is required for exactly that reason. Do not put a description there — put the thing that uniquely identifies the payment.
Confirming is two steps on purpose. Pressing Enter in a field does nothing, and the button arms into a confirmation naming the amount, the currency and the reference before it will write. After it saves, the balance does not move immediately. The panel writes a recharge entry and the gateway applies it on its next configuration poll, within about thirty seconds. A balance that has not changed yet is not a failure.

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Switching between prepaid and postpaid

The same card switches billing mode, and warns before saving either way:
  • To postpaid — the account stops spending its balance. Anything already reserved stays reserved until it is released.
  • To prepaid — the limit is cleared and the account spends its balance again. Usage since the last bill is still owed.
A postpaid credit limit of zero is not unlimited — it is no credit, and the account would be unable to send anything. The form refuses it rather than accepting a setting that silently stops a customer.
Switch credit off leaves an account sending until the block it already holds runs out, then stops. It is not instant.

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Does the credit add up?

Two identities over the account’s whole lifetime: every unit credited is still in the balance or reserved against it, and what was reserved covers what was spent. It does not run on its own — press Reconcile. Two figures come back. Unexplained is the residual, and the one worth acting on. Reserved, not yet spent is normal on an account that is sending. Beneath them, a plain-language account of everything that did not balance. The distinctions that matter:
There is no “fix it” button, deliberately. Reconciliation never writes an adjusting entry.A residual is the part nobody could explain, and posting an adjustment for it would balance the books by hiding the cause. It is also always lifetime-scoped, never a period — an identity that holds over a month but not over the account’s life has not held.

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Money in and out

Every recharge and transfer, searchable by reference, note or type, sortable and paged. By default the ledger lists only entries a person or the billing system wrote. The gateway’s own credit reservations are hidden and counted instead — roughly one every twenty messages, each moving credit between two columns of one row and netting to zero. Show them reveals the lot. The State column carries the part people miss: Pending means the gateway has not applied it yet. Where an account has no balance row, a positive entry says either that it is waiting for the row and will credit itself the moment it exists, or that it was applied before the row went missing and nothing can now say what it credited.

How prepaid credit works

Blocks, reservations and what the gateway does when credit runs out.

Postpaid accounts

Billing in arrears against a limit.