Usage meters

Usage meters define types of usage and units of measure for those types. Service providers can use billing schedules to set up automated billing to bill customers for monthly usage transactions. Usage meters contain actual usage amounts on billing schedules and are used to calculate the price of the usage.

A usage meter is defined for each type of usage that is to be billed. The monthly usage can be stored in usage meters for assets and locations. The usage for an asset or location can be entered manually or can be imported from an external system. The usage amounts in the usage meters are used to calculate the usage charges. These billing schedules can be used to bill for any type of usage measurement, such as the number of miles driven. Each usage measurement appears on a separate line on the customer invoice.

For example, for email services or storage services, customers are billed based on the amount of storage space used (unit of measure Gigabytes). For data back-up and restore services, customers are billed based on the backup file size, the frequency of backups, and the number of generations of backups stored. The usage meters containing actual usage amounts on the billing schedule are used to calculate the price of the usage. The price is based on the price per unit of measure for the usage meter and the amount of usage.

A Sales Order is created for each separate record of usage recorded for an asset or location.