Usage based billing

Dreamhouse, a real estate company, has recently marketed new services to its customers, such as house cleaning, garden maintenance or laundry. These services are purchased as monthly subscriptions, with a number of hours determined in the initial contract. However, clients sometimes order additional hours, and D'Angelo, the Dreamhouse administrator, does not know how to simply pass on these additional hours to the monthly bill.

He searches in the Frisbii documentation, and discovers that Fall '22 includes usage based billing.

Here's what he learns :

Dreamhouse markets its services on a fixed-price basis: each client determines a fixed number of hours of service to be provided each month when the contract is signed. At the end of the month, the hours actually worked are brought up to date in order to be invoiced in real terms.
Some services in the contract are billed on a flat-rate basis, with no indexation to actual hours.

Here are some examples of how this consumption-based billing is used:

• The electricity and gas subscription: each month you pay a subscription for access to services, and you also pay for your actual consumption according to a single tariff (electricity in kw/h, gas in m3).

• The mobile package: each month you pay a flat-rate subscription, in which consumption and services are already included (call hours, SMS/MMS, GB of data, etc.). If you exceed the consumption limits set out in your package, you pay for the excess at a different rate from that of the package. For this use case, you have to create two product records per service or product: One billed according to the flat rate, and one billed according to the increased rate, if the flat rate is exceeded.

Frisbii makes it possible to respond to these two use cases by configuring the application according to your billing needs.

Activate usage-based billing on the Corporate Name

The implementation of the function is quite simple. In order for actual consumption to be taken into account for a product, you simply need to tick a box to indicate that this product is billed in real terms.

Note: depending on your use case, you will have to create flat-rate products (not invoiced in real terms) and/or products invoiced in real terms. The two types of products can coexist in the same subscription.
In the case of Dreamhouse, they wish to invoice the hours of service at the same rate. D'Angelo therefore creates a single product for each type of service (cleaning, garden maintenance, etc.). It also creates a flat-rate product for management costs, invoiced monthly.

Steps

Starting with Summer '23 (3.250), you must first enable the feature:

1. Go to the Corporate Name tab.

2. Check the Enable billing based on consumption check box.

   Note: Ask your admin to add the field to the Lightning page if necessary.

Starting with Winter '25 (4.29), you can choose to generate a monthly Actual Activity, regardless of your subscription frequency.

Example: your subscription is annual, but consumption is entered monthly. By enabling this setting, the Contract generates 12 Actual Activities for annual billing.

1. Go to the Corporate Name tab.

2. Check the Generate actual activities on a monthly check box.

Note: Ask your administrator to add the field to the Lightning page if necessary.

Activate usage-based billing on products

Implementing the function is fairly straightforward. For actual consumption to be taken into account on a product, you simply need to tick a box to indicate that this product is billed on an actual basis.

Note: depending on your use case, you'll need to create flat-rate products (not billed at actual consumption) and/or products billed at actual consumption. Both types of product coexist within the same subscription.
In Dreamhouse's case, they want to bill the hours of service at the same rate. D'Angelo therefore creates a single product for each type of service (cleaning, garden maintenance, etc.). It also created a flat-rate product for management fees, billed monthly.

Steps

3. Repeat this procedure for all the products you wish to bill according to their consumption.

How usage-based billing works

Once the products have been activated to be invoiced on an actual basis, it is a matter of creating an opportunity to define what is to be invoiced and how. As the opportunity is won, a contract will automatically be created with the information from the opportunity.

Steps

At the level of the contract created:

To get an overview of the contract, ask your administrator to add the following associated lists to the Contract:

• Subscription Items by offering to display the following information: Product, Unit Price excluding VAT, Quantity and Consumption,

• Invoices,

• Actual activity by offering to display the following information: Date, Quantity consumed and Unit of measurement.

Once the contract is created from the closed won opportunity, we see that:

• Subscription items for consumption-based products are at 0, because quantity = 0.

• The invoices are created, they only take into account the flat rate products, the others being at 0.

• In the Actual activities section, you can enter the quantities actually consumed.

Steps

The actual quantities of each product invoiced for consumption are added, in comparison with the standard quantities :


The first invoice is updated with the actual quantities:

Actual Activity Report

The SD team members want to be able to enter consumption data more easily, without having to open each actual activity record. They ask D'Angelo if there is any other way. After reading the documentation, the administrator shows them a report that allows them to make the global entry.

Steps

• Activity per month

• Actual activity

• Actual activity by invoice

• Entering Actual Activity