Billing Activation Rules

There are times where a product needs to be configured to go from an inactive state to an active billing state based on the first time the service is used. Some refer to this as Bill-on-First-Use. These scenarios are particularly helpful when selling products that are contracted by the number of active seats/connections/users and are sold in blocks of use.

Bucket Allocations

Billing Activation Rules allow the administrator to configure a Bucket Allocation of usage that have some activation rules set. The two rules are generally:

• Expiry Time

• Usage Threshold

These activation settings determine when to trigger billing for packages that are configured with a billing activation service. For example you could configure '1' 'Megabyte' and '1' 'Week' and any package setup with an activation service using the activation bucket would become active when either a megabyte of data is used (calculated using the combined usage from all of the services in the package) or a week has gone by since the package was added to the account (whichever condition is met first).

Billing Activation Service

A billing activation service is used to initiate billing for packages that the service is configured on (i.e. the activation service triggers billing for all other services in the package assigned to the account based on the activation criteria specified).

Billing activation services can initiate package billing based on usage (e.g. a bill on first usage scenario where a single byte of usage from any account-service in the account-package triggers billing), after a certain amount of time has passed (e.g. initiate billing ten days after the account-package was added to the account) or using both a certain amount of usage and a specified time period (whichever condition is met first will trigger account-package billing).

Usage thresholds and time period settings for billing activation are configured on usage buckets, as mentioned above, that have the 'Billing Activation' bucket setting enabled. Once a billing activation service has been setup and activated it will be selectable in the 'Billing Activation Service' field on package frequencies which are configured under packages.

End Result

When looking to enable billing for a product based on a threshold of time or a certain amount of usage processed, Billing Activation rules provide a mechanism to automate this process using internal LogiSense triggers when thresholds are exceeded.