Rating Usage with Price Schedules

Salesforce CPQ and Billing let you manage usage with price schedules or consumption schedules. For more information on consumption schedules, check out Usage-Based-Products.

To rate usage with a price schedule, set your product’s charge type to Usage and provide it with a discount schedule. Price schedules inherit their name, account, price book, and discount unit from the discount schedule. They also have lookups to the order and order product that they target. A range-type discount schedule creates a volume-type price schedule, and a slab-type discount schedule creates a tier-type price schedule.

Note Price schedules don't support amount-based additional discounts.

A usage summary’s price is based off where the summary’s total quantity falls within the price schedule. So, when you use volume price schedules, your usage records and usage summary all have the same unit price. But for tiered price schedules, your usages can have different unit prices than the usage summary based on how their quantity ranges fall in each price tier.

Price tiers inherit their name, number, bounds, and discount value from the discount tier. Every price tier also has a Price field. By default, Salesforce CPQ calculates each tier’s price based on the order product’s unit price minus the volume discount for that tier. For example, let’s say you had an order product with a value of $100 and quantity of 1. Your price schedule contains a tier with bounds of 1 through 11 and a discount amount of 30%. Salesforce CPQ calculates a price of $70 for that tier.

When you upload usage, each usage calculates its unit price based on where the usage would fall within the price schedule’s price tiers. If you're using a tiered, per-unit price schedule, usage with a quantity of five would fall in the first tier, leading to a unit price of $70 and subtotal of $350.

When you make discount schedules for a usage product, create discount tiers so that the resulting price tiers have your desired per-unit pricing for your usage records. You can still edit a price tier's price after order product creation and before order product activation.

You can also create a price schedule manually and assign it to an order. However, creating all the price schedule's tiers and prices for every order containing your usage order product would take a lot of time. We recommend always assigning a discount schedule to your usage product so that Salesforce can auto-generate all the related price schedules.

Important

• Always use a lower bound of zero for your first tier, allowing users to upload fractional usage quantities between zero and one.
• Even if your usage product isn’t discountable, or you don’t want to discount usages with quantities less than one, you still need a discount tier with a lower bound of zero to use fractional usage.
• Always create a discount schedule with an unbounded upper tier. If there is no unbounded upper tier, then the price schedules create an extra tier to account for quantities sold outside the last discount schedule's tier's upper bound. Since this final tier does inherit a discount from a discount tier, its price is equal to your usage order product's entire unit price.
• When Salesforce Billing invoices an order product with a charge type of Usage, it invoices only the usage summary's unbilled subtotal, and doesn't include the order product's billable unit price. If you want to charge customers for both usage and a flat order product fee, create a separate order product.

Example Your customer sells a data recovery response subscription as a usage product.

Product

Subscription Pricing: Fixed Price

Charge Type: Usage

Billing Frequency: Monthly

List Price: $100

When an end user receives a data recovery response, you upload the response incident as a usage record. Your customer wants a pricing structure that provides increasing discounts for 1-10, 11-20, 21-30, and 30 or more incidents. Create a range discount schedule with a discount unit of Percent and the following discount tiers.

Discount Tiers

Tier Name	Lower Bound	Upper Bound	Discount (%)
Response Range 1	1	11	10
Response Range 2	11	21	15
Response Range 3	21	null	20

Note Remember, range discount schedules provide the tier’s discount to your entire quantity of units. If you want a schedule that provides each tier’s discount to only the quantity of units within that tier – 10% for the first ten products, 15% for the next 10 products – use a slab discount schedule.

When your customer orders one subscription of this usage product, Salesforce Billing converts the discount schedule into a price schedule with a type of Volume and discount unit of Percent. It contains the following tiers.

Price Tiers

Tier Name	Lower Bound	Upper Bound	Volume Discount	Price
Response Range 1	1	11	$10	$90
Response Range 2	11	21	$15	$85
Response Range 3	21	31	$20	$80

The end customer has twelve incidents in January, so your workflow rule uploads a quantity-12 usage record to the order product’s usage summary. Since twelve units fall within price tier 2, the usage has a unit price of $85 and subtotal of $1020.

Usage Summary

Summary Start Date: 01/01/18

Summary End Date: 01/31/18

Total Quantity: 12

Unbilled Subtotal: $1020

Later that day, your invoice scheduler picks up the recovery response order product for invoicing, which produces an invoice line with a subtotal of $1020.