Time Machine

Time Machine lets you clone your organisation's own data into a private, isolated sandbox, then fast-forward that sandbox's clock to see exactly what happens — without ever touching your real customers, sending a real email or webhook, or creating a real charge.

What this does for you

Think of it as a safe rehearsal space for time-based billing behaviour. Instead of waiting for a real billing cycle to roll over to see what an invoice or a usage debit will look like, you create a sandbox (a full copy of your org's data in its own database), move its clock forward to whatever date you want to test, and inspect exactly what fired and what changed — with a guarantee that nothing in the sandbox can ever reach a real customer, post a real charge, or affect your live data.

Advancing a sandbox's clock runs every scheduled billing job that falls due between the sandbox's current clock and your target date — renewal invoices, credit expiry, entitlement resets, trial conversions, failed-payment reminders, usage pull, and the usage-to-wallet debit — in the order they would actually fire.

Who can use it

Time Machine is gated by both a feature flag and a set of permissions, so it may not be visible to you even as an admin.

• The feature must be turned on for your organisation — if you don't see Time Machine under Settings, ask your Kribana contact to confirm it's enabled.
• Viewing sandboxes, their timeline, and wallet state requires timeMachine.view.
• Creating a sandbox requires timeMachine.create.
• Advancing a sandbox's clock, resyncing it, taking or restoring snapshots, and running a balance prediction require timeMachine.run.
• Destroying a sandbox, or deleting a snapshot, requires timeMachine.delete.

These are ordinary, grantable permissions — your organisation's admin can assign them to any role from Users & Roles, the same way any other permission is granted.

Where to find it

• Settings → Customizations → Time Machine — the main entry point. Everything is on one page: the sandbox clock, what fired, wallet balances, snapshots and balance prediction.
• Directly from a Company or Subscription record — click the Time Machine button next to Edit on either detail page to jump straight in. Sandboxes clone your whole organisation, not just one company or subscription, so this is a shortcut to the same page rather than a scoped view.

How to use it

1. Create a sandbox. If you don't have one yet, click Create sandbox from production. It clones your organisation's data and shows a "Cloning your organisation's data…" screen — this usually takes a few seconds. Your org can have one active sandbox at a time. A failed creation is listed with the reason it failed and a Destroy option so you can start again.
2. Read the sandbox clock. The Sandbox clock card shows the sandbox's virtual date and time next to the real production time, with a "+N days ahead" label. The header also shows a status such as "Ready · 40 days ahead of prod", plus Resync from prod (re-clone your latest live data) and Destroy sandbox.
3. Check what's expected. Under the target chips, Expected to fire in that window shows an estimate of what is due before your target date: renewals, trial endings, credit expiries, entitlement resets and dunning retries, counted from your live schedules. It is an estimate: a subscription can renew more than once in a long window, and emails, webhooks and charges aren't predicted.
4. Travel forward. Choose a target — 2 weeks, 1 month, 1 quarter (the default), 6 months, 1 year or 18 months — and click Travel forward, or click Pick a date… to choose an exact date and time and then Advance clock. You can also drag the pill along the ruler at the top of the page. You can only move the clock forward: a date at or before the current virtual clock isn't accepted.
5. Wait while it travels. A full-screen "Sit tight! You're travelling forward in time…" screen shows the date you're heading to and how many scheduled jobs have been processed. Short jumps take seconds; a jump of several months can take a couple of minutes, because every billing date in between is processed in order. If it is taking a while, click Keep working while it runs to hide the screen: the travel carries on in the background, and the header shows "Travelling…" until it finishes.
6. See what fired. What fired lists the events with their sandbox time, type, subject, amount and outcome. Use the filter buttons (All, plus one for each kind of event that fired, with counts) to narrow the list, and Export CSV to download everything that matches the current filter. Click a row for the full event, and use Previous / Next to page through them.
7. Inspect the rest. Check Wallet balances, take or Restore a Snapshot, and run Predict future balance. The side panel shows the sandbox's details (including how many companies, subscriptions and invoices were cloned), a reminder of what can never leave the sandbox (emails, webhooks, charges, tax filings) and your journey so far.

Tips / things to know

• Nothing that happens in a sandbox is visible anywhere else — it's a separate database, with its own clock, that never reads from or writes to your live data.
• If any action inside the sandbox would normally send a real email, webhook, or payment/tax provider call, it's automatically intercepted and blocked instead — you'll see a note if this happened during your last advance.
• Destroy your sandbox once you're done, especially since your org can only have one at a time. Moving the clock to a new date doesn't affect production: the "Production" time on the clock card is always the real time. A sandbox that has not been changed for 24 hours is destroyed automatically.
• To get back to an earlier point, take a Snapshot before you travel and Restore it afterwards; to start completely fresh with your latest live data, use Resync from prod or destroy and re-create the sandbox.