Incrementable Property

An incrementable property is a numeric user attribute you raise or lower by a delta instead of overwriting — for example a purchase-count counter that goes up by one each time.

The difference between incrementing and setting is subtle but important: setting knows the current value and places it, while incrementing does not need to know the prior value and just says 'add one.' This helps counters whose events are spread across devices or sessions, where the client does not know the total. But an incrementable property carries an inherent risk: if the same call arrives twice due to a network retry, the counter rises twice and quietly overcounts — the very problem deduplication solves for events but which is harder for increments. So for sensitive numbers such as total purchase amount, it is often safer to compute the sum in the report from raw events rather than incrementing client-side.