August’s releases split cleanly in two. One half removes blind spots, letting you see a firmware rollout charge point by charge point, the issues attached to a specific station, and what the platform costs you at each site. The other half removes dead ends, so a corporate budget that runs out mid-month, an RFID card the local account cannot authorize, and a card payment that needs partly reversing all now have a way forward instead of a refusal.
Featured this month: automatic firmware updates, now on for every operator
Firmware management is one of the least visible jobs in running a charging network. You push an update to a few hundred charge points from three vendors, then find out how it went by opening stations one at a time and reading version numbers.
Why it matters
Automatic firmware updates and rollout tracking are now available to every operator. You can build an automation, target it precisely, and follow each charge point from the moment it matches through to the version it ends up running. Enabling the capability sends no firmware by itself, so nothing changes on your network until you choose to act.
How it works
You pick a firmware source and version, then narrow the population with trigger and exclusion criteria. As you select vendors, models and versions, each option shows how many of your charge points match, so the size of a rollout is visible before you save it rather than after you run it.
From there, the Firmware update executions panel is where you watch it: the timeline, the charge point, the status, and the firmware version before and after, with failure reasons shown inline. Two things that used to stay hidden now surface. Updates that succeed while the charge point reports a version other than the one you targeted appear as “Succeeded (different version)”, and every automation keeps a record of each charge point it has matched, with the current version and how many attempts have been made. Both export to CSV.
What you get
A rollout you can report on. Instead of telling a vendor that some of their units are failing, you send a list with model, location, firmware version and the exact failure reason attached to each one.
You also get the failures you did not know about. Charge points that report a version other than the one you sent are the ones that quietly stay unpatched for months, and they are now a group you can filter for rather than a discovery you make during an audit.
Corporate billing
Charging continues when a corporate policy cannot cover it. When a corporate billing policy cannot cover a session, the platform can now start it on the driver’s eligible subscription or default personal payment method instead of refusing it. The driver app can also show why corporate billing was unavailable, whether that is an exhausted spending limit, an inactive policy, a charger type or country the policy does not cover, or a currency mismatch, both at the moment the session starts and when the driver opens it later. For an employer whose monthly budget runs out on the 24th, this turns a hard stop into a handover: the employee keeps charging and pays the remainder themselves, and nobody calls support to ask why the card was declined. Where the driver has no eligible payment method, no session is created and the reason travels with the standard error so the app can send them to add one.
B2B partner invoicing
July’s edition featured issuing partner invoices straight from settlement reports. August fills in the workflow around it, which is where most of the day-to-day work actually happens.
Credit notes for partner invoices. A credit note fully reverses an issued partner invoice, stays linked to the original for audit, and returns the settlement report to Ready to invoice so you can issue a corrected one. Invoices already marked paid can be credited too, with the refund or recovery arranged directly with the partner. You can credit several at once from the invoice list, and the platform reports back on anything it skipped.
Self-billing invoices, for the months you owe the partner. Partner invoicing now runs in both directions. When invoiceable revenue exceeds invoiceable expenses, the platform issues a self-billing invoice on the partner’s behalf, with the partner as seller and your organization as buyer. This is the site-host and revenue-share case, where a partner’s share outweighs the deductions. There is no separate action to learn: the existing Issue partner invoice action reads the balance and picks the right document.
Invoices that reach the partner without you sending them. Enable B2B invoices in a partner’s notification settings and each newly issued invoice goes to their billing contact with the PDF attached and a link back to it, and authorized users can resend when needed. Partner users can now open, filter, export and download their own invoices rather than asking you for copies. Invoices also keep the billing period they cover, so it appears in the list, in exports, and as a filter, which saves opening the settlement report to work out what a given invoice was for.
Payments, billing and refunds
Refund the amount that is actually in dispute. Admins can now issue partial refunds on Stripe and Worldline card payments, and record several refunds against one transaction up to its original total, instead of choosing between refunding everything and refunding nothing. The refund field pre-fills with the amount still available, pending and finalized refunds both count against the remaining balance, and a refund that fails releases its amount back for another attempt. Each individual refund appears in the refund screens, exports and notifications, so a transaction with three partial refunds reads as three events rather than one confusing total. Refunds need to be enabled for your processor first, through Refund allowed for Stripe or Allow refund processing for Worldline.
The payment terminal stops asking for a card twice. Both sides of this shipped in August. The platform now tells the terminal app whether a charging start has already been authorized when the connector enters Preparing, and the terminal app’s simplified screensaver journey lets the driver carry on without a second card prompt when it receives that. Sessions that genuinely need a card at the terminal keep the existing flow, and if the platform cannot match an authorization reliably the driver is asked for a card as before.
User billing settings now belong to each operator. Pre-authorization amounts, balance usage, post-paid grace periods, billing strategy, vouchers, top-up details and bank information moved from one tenant-wide configuration to each operator’s own. Operators sharing a tenant can run different currencies, billing policies and regulatory requirements without stepping on each other, and the platform applies the settings of whichever operator owns the charge, purchase, tariff or subscription in question. Existing settings were copied across, so current behavior carries over unchanged.
Billable and grace time, visible on the session. Individual session details now break duration into total, billable and grace time, separately for charging and idle periods where both apply. When a driver questions an idle fee, the answer is on the session record instead of in a calculation someone has to reconstruct.
Vehicle details on receipts. Turning on Show vehicle in the built-in e-receipt integration adds vehicle information to receipts issued from that point on, across per-session, period and post-paid subscription receipts. It gives fleet operators and their finance teams a way to match a charging cost to a specific vehicle without cross-referencing session exports.
A warning before an unusually large voucher goes out. The operator dashboard now flags when a voucher, promo code or driver balance top-up is far above your recent amounts, on adding to a balance, creating bulk vouchers, and creating or editing vouchers and promo codes. It is advisory, so a genuinely large amount still goes through, but a misplaced decimal point in a bulk voucher run gets questioned before it is spent rather than after.
Roaming
A roaming partner can authorize a card your own account cannot. Local authorization is still tried first. If it fails for a reason tied to the card, the account, verification, a subscription, corporate billing or the payment method, selected roaming connections can now be asked to authorize that same card in real time, and the first partner to approve takes the session. Those sessions become roaming sessions and follow normal roaming settlement rather than being billed to the local fleet user. It is off by default and enabled per connection, and it deliberately does not fire when charging is blocked for an operational, access, session or tariff reason, so a charge point you have taken out of service stays out of service. For fleets running one card across networks, and for operators partway through a migration, this is the difference between a driver charging and a driver calling you from the forecourt.
Roaming token identifiers on every session. The token identifiers captured when a partner’s token authorizes a session are now visible per session. When a partner queries a charge, you can match it to the driver’s physical card or app rather than reasoning from timestamps.
A check on roaming CDR durations. A session validation rule, active by default, compares the duration values inside a roaming charge detail record and flags the session when the largest discrepancy passes a threshold you set in minutes. It skips sessions with too little to compare rather than flagging on thin data, so what it surfaces is worth investigating before you decide whether to keep billing or take it up with the partner.
Home, fleet and depot charging
Require authentication on home chargers. A new operator setting blocks auto-start without authentication across all personal charge points under an operator, so every session on them is tied to an identified user. That matters most in shared residential settings, where an apartment building’s billing and reporting depend on knowing who charged. The driver app now shows the setting as required with an explanation rather than letting someone try to change it and fail, for charger owners and for people invited through charger sharing. Public and private charge points are unaffected.
Home chargers that activate themselves when a resident claims them. With auto-enable on claim turned on, disabled personal chargers stay discoverable in the app’s self-onboarding flow and become active as soon as a resident successfully claims one. This is written for new-build residential, where chargers go in months before anyone moves in and every unit would otherwise need switching on by hand. Chargers marked out of order stay out of the flow, and assigning an owner another way, through a reimbursement invite or an integration, does not activate anything.
Autocharge for vehicles nobody registered in advance. On charge points configured to allow charging without authentication, an unrecognized vehicle identifier from an Autocharge-capable vehicle can now start an anonymous session, where before it could be declined even though other unrecognized identifiers were accepted on the same charge point. Depots get the obvious benefit: drivers charge without every vehicle being enrolled first, and the identifiers the platform detects still appear in vehicle authorizations so you can see what has been charging. A registered credential that has been suspended stays blocked.
Network operations and monitoring
Move between the Locations list and the map without rebuilding your filters. July’s edition covered finding faulted and offline sites on the map. This adds the other half: a map icon next to Filters opens your current results on the map, a list icon brings you back, and filters shared by both views carry across, including faults and connectivity loss and the roaming filters. Anything that cannot travel is dropped with a notification naming it. Filter to what needs attention, switch to the map, select an area, export what is in it, and a technician has a route.
Issues on the station they belong to. Charge point and EVSE details pages now carry an Issues tab, with a count of how many are currently open. Investigating a station you already suspect no longer means going to the Issues section and filtering your way back to it.
Export downtime periods. Downtime records now export from the Downtime periods tab of a charge point or EVSE, whether you select a few records or the whole filtered list. It needs the export permission in the Downtime periods set. For anyone reporting uptime to a site host or a funding body, this is the underlying data rather than a summary.
Platform fees, per charge point. A new Expenses lens replaces each combined platform fee record with per-charge-point records, filterable by charge point, location and partner contract, and leaves every other expense type as it was. In a revenue-share conversation with a site host, that means arriving with the cost at the site under discussion rather than a network-wide figure you have to apportion on the spot.
Compliance across more markets
E-invoicing for a new market, without waiting for a release. The Avalara e-invoicing connector is now driven by configuration rather than code. A country mandate is enabled by linking an Avalara company, creating a mandate configuration and mapping its fields, with no development work per country, mandate or document type, and one integration can serve several country mandates at the same time. The document each tax authority receives is built from an editable field mapping instead of a template written for that country. Poland’s KSeF and Italy’s SDI are the first two mandates running on it. It reuses the invoicing foundations already in place, including UBL 2.1 generation, the fiscal document lifecycle, invoice numbering, the retry mechanism and the e-invoicing lens, so the operational side stays familiar as markets are added.
In the driver app
What the charge point screen tells a driver, from arrival to receipt. Four updates across August gave the charge point display a complete pricing story. Before charging, supported OCPP 2.0.1 charge points can show pricing text you write yourself, from a new Price information field on the tariff’s display tab, with translations and a fallback language. During the session, compatible charge points show the running cost alongside that text, plus a breakdown of energy, duration, connection and idle fees, and on supported dynamic tariffs the next rate and when it takes effect. At the end, a final cost breakdown; and on compatible OCPP 1.6 charge points, one additional idle-pricing update when a session ends while the vehicle is still plugged in, carrying the remaining grace period and the hourly idle rate where those apply, which is what prompts a driver to come back and move the car.
Whether a connector has a cable. Each connector in a location’s details now shows Pre-cabled or No cable, across every connector type the platform has format information for, and screen readers announce it. It answers the question that decides whether a driver can use a charge point at all, before they drive to it.
Facilities in search results. Configured facilities such as parking, restrooms or food now appear as chips on location cards in nearby and search results, as well as on the location details view, using the same icons and translated labels as the existing facilities filter. Drivers comparing three sites can see which one has somewhere to wait without opening each of them.
What’s next
AMPECO ships every week, and this edition pulls out the August releases worth a closer look. A few things are close behind: location-wide outage detection that tells you a whole site is down rather than one charge point, tax-inclusive totals on settlement reports, and custom fields on charging sessions. If you already run AMPECO, your account team can walk you through any of the above. If you are evaluating the platform, book a demo to see it in action.
