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Usage Processing
Salesforce Billing lets you customize how you track and group instances of usage. (Salesforce Billing Managed Package)
Required Editions
| Available in: Salesforce Billing Summer ’17 and later |
Usage products are represented by order products with a Charge Type field of Usage. Admins first define charge type on the product record, which passes its charge type first to the quote line and then to the order product.
Usage products are typically billed in arrears, since vendors have to gather usage data before actually billing. However, there are several other use cases associated with usage products. Usually, vendors bill usage products repeatedly over time, with each finance period containing its own tracked usage data.
Quoted usage is effectively an estimate, so it affects bookings value. The actual invoice amount may differ from the quote estimate.
The usage object represents the amount of service consumed over time. You can measure service as a single event or as a collection of expenses over time. Let’s look at a few examples.
- A company sells a cell phone data plan that charges by the megabyte per day. A user streams 20 megabytes of data while commuting each weekday between 5:00 and 5:30 P.M., which is logged as a usage record. Over the course of a week, their account ends up with five unique usage records. Each record represents the 30 minutes of service on a given day. In this case, they’re using one usage record to represent all thirty minutes — this is an example of a single usage record representing a non-single quantity of usage.
- A company sells a security alarm response system. Each triggering of the alarm and the subsequent response represents a unit of usage — this is an example of a single usage record representing a single quantity of usage.
Usage summaries act as grouping objects for usage records, summarizing individual usage quantities into a total quantity that vendors can use for invoicing. If our cell phone user’s vendor wants to bill monthly, they could use a usage summary record that totals the quantities from all 20 usage records that user created over the month.
- Prerated Usage
Allow your customers to define their own amounts and quantities on their usage records. A customer-defined value overrides any rated value that Salesforce Billing would calculate. Prerated usage is useful for tracking billing expenses, pass-through postage, and third-party rating charges. (Salesforce Billing Managed Package) - Managing Usage Processing Errors
If Salesforce Billing encounters an error when trying to associate usage with a usage summary, it sets the usage's status to Error or Warning - Unrated and shows an error message explaining the issue. In this case, take the required corrective actions and then change the usage record’s status to New. After the status becomes New, Salesforce Billing attempts to process the usage again. (Salesforce Billing Managed Package)
