Tracking and accounting for AI provider credits

Prepaid and promotional credits from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others: balances, burn, expiry, and how they show up in the books.

By Keyveve, Inc. · Updated 2026-10-22

Credits are how many AI startups pay for inference in their first year: startup programs, cloud marketplace commitments, prepaid top-ups. They're also easy to lose track of.

Three questions to answer every month

1. What's left? Per provider and per grant.
2. When does it run out? At the rate you're using it, and when does each grant expire?
3. What's at risk of expiring unused? That's money left on the table.

The provider consoles show a balance, but rarely the expiry calendar across grants, and never what your product's burn means for the date you start paying cash.

How drawdown works

Providers apply usage to credits before charging your card. A sensible model, and the one Veqen uses, is first-expiring first: each day's usage reduces the earliest-expiring active grant until it's exhausted, then the next. When a grant expires, its remainder is forfeited.

When the credits run out

If $25,000 of promotional credits covers six months, your gross margin is overstated for six months, then drops overnight. Track usage as if you were paying, so pricing decisions are made on real costs. In Veqen, every call is priced at list rates (or your negotiated custom prices) whether or not credits cover it, so dashboards and budgets always show the real cost.

In the books

• Prepaid credits you paid for are a prepaid expense, a current asset. Each month, usage they cover moves from the asset to expense.
• Promotional credits usually aren't recorded as an asset, and the usage they cover isn't an expense.
• Expired prepaid credits are written off when they expire.

See How to account for AI inference costs for the full month-end entry.

With Veqen

Record each grant on the Credits page. Veqen draws it down first-expiring first, from what the provider billed where a cost connection exists and from tracked spend otherwise, warns owners, admins and finance 30 and 7 days before credits with a balance expire, and books the drawdown in the monthly close.