Single Billing

1 What is the process for the Single Billing?

Single billing consists in aggregating the Bills from all the applications a customer is using and send one consolidated invoice at the end of an invoicing period.

Applications may have different billing cycles and invoicing dates and an invoice sent by a platform includes all the bills received during an invoicing period.

1.1 What should I send?

No matter the way you charge (per user, per company, per volume of data, etc.), Maestrano's billing engine is flexible enough to support your existing billing without requiring you to modify your processes. The information required when sending a Bill to the platform is the amount due, the currency and whether revenue sharing applies (typically monthly plan) or not (SMS, training, customisation...). Maestrano's billing engine will aggregate all the Bills for one customer on every platform, with other amount owed to other applications providers.

1.2 Free trial period

It is recommended to propose a free trial period to users so they can trial an application and hopefully adopt it. During the free-trial period, no subscription related bills should be sent. Once the free-trial period expires,

At the end of the free trial, you want to be sure that either the user has entered a credit card in the platform and will be charged when you will send a bill or that the user does not have access to his account from the platform. Two possibilities:

• you can enter a free trial period on your developer account (Pricing part on Marketing section) and the SSO will be blocked at the end of the free trial period if the user has not entered a credit card
• you can query a group from the membership API and look at the field giving you this information (e.g. see related SDK documentation) and then contact the user / de-activate the account / ...

Either way, it is recommended that you inform the user they will start being charged for using the application.

2 How does the single billing work?

2.2 Maestrano invoicing cycle

Maestrano's invoicing period runs from the 25th of the month until the 24th of the following month. All bills received from the applications a customer use are aggregated into one single invoice and sent to the customer. Customers are then charged on the 2nd of the following month and monies transferred back to application providers afterwards.

2.3 Recurring bills

The application provider can also chose to bill its customers on a regular basis. By creating a Recurring bill on Maestrano, a new bill is going to be automatically generated every month, and the corresponding customer is going to be charged on the 25th.

A Recurring bill is created for a predefined period of time (eg: a given number of months).

Recurring bills can have several statuses:

1. When the Recurring bill is created, its status will be set at Submitted
2. Once it has generated a first bill, the Recurring bill will then be at status Active
3. The Recurring bill can then be deleted (cancelled) by the app provider, its status will thus be at Cancelled
4. When the Recurring bill has reached its last specified cycle (eg: 12 months + 1 day for a 12 months recurring bill), its status will be at Expired
   
   

3 FAQ

Is the application provider notified when the status of a recurring bill changes?

No, because the status changes are in the control of the app provider anyway (cancellation, expiration...). However, the app provider can query Recurring bills at any time if needed.

What happens to the Recurring bills when a customer unsubscribes? Does the application provider need to do anything special with the bills?

Nothing special is expected from the application provider: Maestrano just won't charge the customer any more.

Upon creation of a Recurring bill, a bill has automatically been created, that has been activated the 25th of the month. When is the following bill going to be created/activated?

Recurring bills have an anniversary date which is the "StartDate" (ie: date at which the recurring bill has been created). Bills will be generated every month at the same day (eg: 9th March, April, May... if the recurring bill has been generated the 9th of February).

I've cancelled a recurring bill, but it did not cancel any of the "child" bills that have been generated. Is that normal?

Yes, upon cancellation of a recurring bill, the bills that have already been issued won't be cancelled, it is just that the recurring bill won't generate new "child" bills. If a "child" bill is still in submitted status, it can also been cancelled separately. Any bill at in invoiced status can no longer be cancelled.

Find out more...

Need for more in-depth information on single-billing? Please visit the SDK free integration section in this wiki.