Creating and managing billing rules

Click the drop-down menu and select the billing product for this rule. Only active products with a billing type of Per Contact and Per Device are available in the list. However, if you are editing an existing rule and the currently selected product is now inactive, it will still be selected.

You cannot have two billing rules with the same product on the same contract.

For information on creating billing products, refer to Adding, editing, or copying a product.

The start date establishes the beginning of the first billing period. It is also the first billing date, and it determines the Day of Month for all following billing dates. It must be greater than or equal to the contract start date.

EXAMPLE  If the start date is January 7, the next billing date will be February 7, and so on.

• If you enter a date of day #29, 30, or 31, and a month does not have that many days, the start date of that period will be the last day of the month.
• If you enter a day that is the last day of that month, we will use the last day of every month following that month.

No charges will be created for periods that would have started after the date entered in this field. If you leave the field blank, the creation of charges ends on the contract end date.

If you enter a date that is later than the contract end date, a message that includes the contract end date will appear.

You may specify a description for this Billing Rule.

• If you leave this field blank, the product's description is defaulted into the billing rule's Description field, but Autotask will never override a manually entered description.
• The description will default into the charge's Description field, in its own paragraph, before the itemized list of covered contacts/devices.

Click the dropdown control and select the Day of Month the number of units is counted for the next billing period. The count day can be the same day as the billing day, or an earlier day.

The number of units will be counted shortly after midnight on the selected day, using the time zone of your default location.

• If you select Day 29, 30, or 31, and the month does not have that many days, the charge will be created on the last day of the month.
• If there is no unit count on the start date of the first billing period (because the day number selected to determine the unit count is greater than the day number of the start date), Autotask will do a unit count when the rule gets created, and use for that first billing period.

EXAMPLE  You count units and create charges on day 15, and bill on day 31 (or the last day of the month). On February 15, you count the number of devices (41) and create the charges.
February 28 is the billing date for the following billing period (2/28 - 3/30).

Defaults to the setting selected for the contract system setting Automatically execute Billing Rule instances (When off you will need to execute Rule instances manually. This setting can be overridden at the Contract Billing Rule level.)

To override the default setting, click the dropdown control and select another option:

• Automatically execute
• Manually execute

This makes it easy to suspend billing for a customer for a limited time.

These check boxes determine if the names of the

• contacts (alphabetically, separated by commas) or
• devices ([Product Name] ([Serial Number]) format

will be added to the Charge Description field, and therefore be listed on the customer invoice. If an item is pro-rated, "(#days)" is appended.

Separate check boxes allow you to include covered items for full billing periods, partial billing periods, or both.

• If your billing rule covers hundreds of devices or contacts, you may not want to display all of the names each month, and leave Full billing periods unchecked.
• Instead, you may wish to only show the newly discovered contacts or devices included in the charge, and check Partial (prorated) billing periods.

For contacts, you have the following choices:

• First Name Last Name
• Last Name, First Name

For devices, you have the following choices:

• Device Name
• IP address
• Reference Name
• Reference Number
• Serial Number

NOTE  If you are integrating with Datto RMM, both the Device Name and the IP Address are pulled from the RMM device audit table.

The billing rule inherits the Price/Cost from the billing product, but this setting can be modified.

• To use the product's price and cost and keep it linked to the setting on the Admin page, keep the default.
• To modify the product's price/cost structure for this billing rule, click the Override Product's Price/Cost radio button.

Tip: to apply the product's Admin prices but protect them from changes made to the Product list in Admin, click Override, but don't change the prices.

These fields are displayed only if the Price/Cost Method is Volume or Tiered.

If the Use Product's Price/Cost radio button is selected, this entire area is read-only, and the Add Tier button and the table's context menu will not display. For information on adding tiers, refer to Setting up volume-based and tiered pricing.

This check box is only enabled when Enable Daily Prorating is selected. It deals with the following scenario:

If a Billing Rule has proration enabled, and a contact has an association with the selected billing product that is effective before the billing rule's start date, a prorated charge will still be created for it, even though the billing rule is not effective for that period.

If you select this check box, this will be prevented.