The 'Rates' screen allows you to configure manual rates for services that do not have a rate provided with their data source. Before you can use this screen, it is required to create the necessary service(s) via the Transcript engine. When that requirement has been fulfilled, you may configure Global and customer specific rate configurations. The following rate types are currently supported for automatic, daily and monthly services:
automatic per unit
automatic per interval
automatic per unit & interval
manual per unit
manual per interval
manual per unit & interval
Automatic services obtain the rate and/or interval value from a column you specify, whereas manual services allow the user to manually specify a rate and fixed interval money value. For manual services, if a service definition has proration enabled, the charge on the cost reports is calculated based on the actual consumption (see services).
By default each service has a global rate configured, which will be applied to all accounts that consume this service. However, it is possible to use customer specific rates by overriding a service rate for one ore multiple accounts.
A manual service can have up to 3 rate values that can be changed: the unit rate, the interval money value and the COGS rate. To change these values, go the 'Services' > 'Rates' screen and click on the service name for which you want to change the global rate value:
To change the rate values of this service, consider the following:
Effective date is the date from when this rate is applied to the service. A service can have one or multiple revisions. You may add new rate revisions by using the Add Revision button. Existing rate revision dates can be changed using the Change Date option
The Per Unit rate value is the value that the service charged for, every (portion of) configured interval service. In this example, if this would be a daily service that is charged 1 euro per Gigabyte of database usage, and each day a 100 GB database is consumed, a value of € 100 will be charged per day (and € 3100 if used for entire month of December)
The Per Interval charge is applied every occurrence of the consumed service, regardless of the total consumed quantity of that service. In the previous example at 2, this would mean every day a value of 110 euro will be charged for a 100 GB database: 100 euro because of the standard rate + 10 euro for the fixed interval charge. Considering the same consumption for the entire month of December, the total charge for that month will be 31 x € 110 = € 3410
It is possible to configure a COGS rate for this service. This is applied the same way as the Per Unit rate
To delete an invalid or wrong revision, use the Remove Revision button. Do bear in mind you cannot delete the last rate revision for a service
To save your changes, which will also initiate a re-preparation of the applicable Report. click the Save Revision button (see defining reports to learn more about report preparation)
If you are planning to make more changes to other services in the same report definition, use the Save Revision > Without Preparing option. This will avoid running the re-preparation several times, and allows you to start the re-preparation only after you've made all of the required rate changes.