Reporting Component Allocations

Please be aware that this help article is related to Advanced Billing's Component Allocations functionality. In order for Advanced Billing to add charges for a subscriber’s components, you must report to Advanced Billing the component’s status/amount. You can learn more about Component Allocations by checking out this help article: Component Allocations Overview.

Reporting Metered Component Usage

As depicted in the metered example above, you record the amount your subscriber consumes as units. At the end of the billing period, Advanced Billing will bill your customer for the total number of units reported. We will reset the component count to zero and the whole process starts over for the new billing period. The first time you record usage on a subscription the price point will get locked in, ensuring the usage is billed at that same price point in the future (unless you manually change the price point).

You can report metered usage in the application by navigating to a subscription and selecting the “Components (Line-Items)” tab. This will display a list of all the available components. Click More (...) to view available options.

• Enter a quantity and (optionally) a memo, and press Record.

• The quantity must be an integer (whole number).

• If you enter a decimal amount for the quantity, it will be silently truncated (not rounded). For example, if you enter 5.5, it becomes 5.

• All recorded usage for a billing period will be tallied and charged at the end of the period.

Reporting Quantity-based Allocations

For quantity-based components, you can record when your customer changes the quantity of units purchased. The assumption is that those units purchased stay in use by your customer forever, until a future change. The exception is for one-time quantity-based components, which will reset to 0 after being allocated.

A common use-case for recurring quantity-based components is software license fees, where you want to collect $100/month for each employee of your customer who accesses your service. So you might set the quantity to 3 and Advanced Billing will bill your customer $300 every billing period until you change the quantity.

By comparison, a one-time quantity-based component is useful for one-time charges, such as a professional service completed.

Quantity component allocations can be updated using the application by selecting the component from the “Components (Line-Items)” tab when viewing a subscription.

Reporting On/off Component Status

On/off components can be toggled using the application by selecting the component from the “Components (Line-Items)” tab when viewing a subscription.

Reporting Prepaid Component Status

Prepaid components will have two primary screens used to report usage: “Record Usage” and “Purchase Prepaid Units”.

First, the subscriber will want to purchase prepaid units, also referred to as creating a prepaid allocation. This screen looks much like the “Update Quantity” page for quantity-based components. However, the proration settings are not included, due to the nature of prepaid components.

Second, once units have been purchased, a subscriber may begin using them. As they do so, the usage can be tracked in Advanced Billing with the “Record Usage” page shown below.

If units are recorded accidentally or otherwise need to be reversed, it’s possible to pass a negative amount to detract from the current usage reported.

Current Prepaid Usage

Within the components table for the subscription, the current usage column breaks down total units recorded compared to total allocations purchased. If any usage is recorded as overage, a small yellow box is shown to denote this.

To the right, the cost column contains two numbers. On the top is the total cost of that component. On the bottom in parentheses is the amount that overages contributed to.

Below, the subscription has purchased 10 allocations, and recorded usage for all 10 of them, for a total of $20. In addition, 1 more unit was recorded as overage at a cost of $3. In total, the component is valued at $23.