Billing Rules Engine User Guide

Billing Rules Engine User Guide

Objective

This article describes how to use the Atria billing rules engine to identify specific Atria entities as non-billable.  

Applies to

Introduced in Atria version 12.0.0

Billing Rule Feature Overview

Many entities - customers, services, users, products and instances, are either billable or non-billable and changes are triggered by the provisioning and de-provisioning of such entities.
Entities that can be provisioned and de-provisioned in Atria include:
  1. Customers
  2. Users
  3. Service Plans
  4. Services
  5. Domain Instantiation
  6. Specific product SKUs
Atria logs all changes to the entity types above as they happen (datetime) throughout the billing period. At the end of the billing period, the service provider can run (and rerun) a set of rules against this information and marks those entities as non-billable.  

This  Billing Summary Report shows the summarised display of monthly billing changes:

Figure 1 - Example Billing Summary Report




Billing Rules Management

By default, all entities start as being marked as billable in the Atria System. The billing rules engine allows you to apply rules to mark specific entities or groups of entities as non-billable. 

Atria’s Service Billing rule configuration page is located under the Reports > Service Billing Configuration menu item. This menu item is only available to service providers.  




Creating a New Billing Rule

To create a new rule, click the ‘New Rule’ Link in the Service Billing Rule Configuration page. This will display the following page:



Rule Setup

Description: The description is to help service providers understand the purpose of the rule and why the rule needs to set the output as non-billable.
Override Reason: The billing item that has been set as non-billable by this rule will be tagged with this description.
Processing Order: This is the order in which this rule will be run. The last rule will take priority when recording the override reason against the billing item.
Valid From and Valid To: Identifies the date range over which the rule should be applied.  Not specifying ‘Valid To’ means the rule will apply indefinitely.
Rule Type: There are many different types of rules that can be set. These are summarised as:

Rule Type

Input

Effect

Single User

The user UPN (e.g. username@domain )

Sets this user to non-billable for all services.

Single Customer

Customer Code (e.g. abr)

Sets this customer non-billable for all services across all users.

Single User Service

User UPN, Service Name

Sets a service for a specific user to be non-billable.

Single Customer Service

Customer Code, Service Name

Sets a service for a specific customer to be non-billable

Service

Service Name

Marks this service as non-billable system wide

SKU

SKU (String)

Any items with this SKU will be excluded from billing

Single User SKU

SKU, User UPN

Any item referenced by this SKU will be marked as non-billable for the specified user.

Single Customer SKU

SKU, Customer Name

Any item referenced by this SKU will be marked as non-billable for the specified customer.

Custom Where Clause

String

For advanced users, a SQL "where" clause can be specified.  All items matching the where clause will be marked as not billable.

Instance

String

Any matching instance will be marked as non billable

Wildcard

String

The wildcard can be applied to a username or a customer name.  All matches will be marked as not billable.

 

Executing Billing rules to set items as Non-Billable

Billing rules are automatically triggered at the end of the billing period (according to the service provider's configured billing period end (see Atria Billing Configuration User Guide for more information). The rules set items to non-billable when the data for the billing period is generated and can subsequently be viewed in the Service Billing Summary and Service Billing Detail Reports.
Note: The service provider can re-generate the billing period data after changing billing rules on demand by clicking the  link on the Service Billing Rule Configuration Page in Atria.

Excluding Test Users

For information on how to exclude test users, please see this guide - https://support.automate101.com/portal/en/kb/articles/how-to-exclude-test-users-from-billing-in-atria


Excluding Demo Customers

For Excluding Demo Customers, we specify that the only Billable customer is a "Standard" customer. Out of the box, Atria has "Standard, Demo and Test" customers.

This is filtered by a Rule Type of "Custom Where Clause" with the query of "CustomerId in (Select CustomerId from Customers c inner join vw_Propertyvalues pv on c.objectid = pv.objectid and pv.property = 'CustomerType' and pv.value = 'Standard')"




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