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Introduction to Billing Features

Introduction​

For an introduction to Billing in Atria, visit our concepts section on tracking and billing.

Product Based Billing​

Atria Services, and Workspace Items all allow a SKU to be defined for alignment with billing system Product Codes. SKU codes make it easy to accurately map to your invoicing system and ensure that changes to product naming do not impact billing.

Billing Relationships​

A Billing Relationship exists to define who receives payment for a delivered service. This powerful feature within Atria allows various channel business models to be supported. Billing relationships are defaulted at reseller level, and are explicitly defined at customer level.

Example scenarios supported:

  1. Reseller supports end-customer, Service Provider bills end-customer for service directly.
  2. Reseller supports and bills end-customer, Service provider bills reseller for services consumed by the resellers sub-customers.
  3. Mixed model - A large customer with a direct Service Provider billing relationship, all other customers billed through one or more resellers.

Read the following article to learn how to set up billing relationships. Understanding and configuring billing relationships.

Billing Periods​

Billing Periods (or months) are configured by the Service Provider. Billing Periods can be configured as, whole months, fixed day of month-end date or days before the end of the month.

Each billing period has a start and end date based on the specified configuration.

So for example, if the month-end for billing is on the 25th of the month. A billing period will automatically get created with a start date of 26th and end date of 25th of the following month. The Billing Period is the container for all of the billable items generated by Atria.

By default, Billing data is recalculated and updated daily for the current billing period.

It is not recommended that you change your billing period configuration after initial setup. If you want to setup billing, the details are in the setup guide, Understanding and configuring billing relationships.

Billing Rules​

Billing rules are defined to disable billing for sets of items. This adds control over what is deemed chargeable to customers. Any number of billing rules can be defined.

Each rule searches through billing data against its defined criteria, any items that match are set to non-billable status.

Each Billing Rule has

  • a date range as to when it applies – outside of this date range, the rule does not apply. This allows service providers to temporarily exclude items from billing, or for billing to start on a particular date.
  • Rules can be set to apply to specific customers, services or users.
  • Custom queries can be added to apply more complex logic.

Billing Reports​

Three standard reports are provided that allow:

  • Summary - View aggregated service billing.
  • Detail - View detailed line items, at user and service level.
  • Analyse - Summarises and compares quantities between billing periods.

Billing Process​

At the end of each billing period,

  • Atria generates a set of billing items based on the services that have been provisioned/de-provisioned within that period (defined by the billing period end date).
  • This also includes all unchanged services carried over from the previous month.
  • Every item that can be billed has an entry in the billing detail table.
  • Once the billing items have been generated for the billing period, the billing rules are run to set all non-billable items.

Using the Billing Data​

Billing data can be viewed through the Atria Billing Details and Billing Summary reports within Atria, extracted to Excel or via the Atria REST API.