THE ESSENTIALS

CRM.COM’s Billing engine manages the recurring billing of your Subscriptions and their services, ensuring that they are always billed on time, accurately and also paid so as to continue servicing your subscribers effectively.

At first, your Product Catalogue serves as the foundation of subscription’s recurring billing, since each service’s price includes its recurring fee and billing terms such as its billing cycle, billing model and termed period (whether is auto-renewed or gets expired). The service’s price terms are used to create a subscription that holds the billing terms, such as its billing day.

Set up your business’s Billing Model by defining rules for Billing, Invoicing, and Payments - the three core components of recurring billing. The process begins by identifying subscriptions due for billing, based on a pre-bill or post-bill model. Once the billing period is determined, the process generates invoices using applicable pricing rules, promotions, and taxes. If a subscriber exceeds their credit limit, automated payments are triggered to collect funds. The billing engine also accounts for scheduled changes on subscriptions to ensure accurate invoicing and payments. If billing fails, the related subscription is automatically deactivated.

First, let's familiarise ourselves with some basic billing terminology used in the software. For additional billing terms, consult the Subscriptions manual.

Subscription Billing Terms

The terms define the billing day and cycle for all of the subscription services as well as the latest and the next billing periods.

Billing Cycle

The time interval for which a subscription and its services are billed on a recurring basis, for example, monthly or quarterly.

Billing Day

The billing day is the specific day a subscription is charged in each billing cycle. For cycles longer than a month, it's a fixed day of the month, for shorter cycles, it's a set day of the week. This billing day applies to all services within the subscription and ensures that any new services added are aligned with the existing billing schedule.

Example

A subscriber purchases a monthly service on the 10th of the month, so the billing day is set to the 10th of each month. If another monthly service is added on the 20th, CRM.COM aligns its billing either immediately or on the next billing cycle.

Pre-Bill vs Post-Bill

CRM.COM supports two billing models:

• Pre-bill: The contact is billed in advance for the upcoming billing cycle

• Post-bill: The contact is billed at the end of the billing cycle, after the service has been used.

The billing model is specified in the service’s price terms, allowing the contact to choose their preferred model when placing the order.

Subscription-driven Billing vs. Payment-driven Billing

Subscription billing is either driven by the subscription’s terms or by the subscriber’s payments:

• Subscription-driven - In this model, billing is controlled by the service's price and billing terms. Services are billed on a recurring basis, according to the defined billing day and cycle. Subscribers must pay to continue using the service.

• Payment-driven - Subscribers control when and how long they use a service by topping up their CRM.COM Wallet. They can add funds anytime, in any amount, using a Commerce Pool that includes the desired service(s).

Proration

Proration is a business rule mainly used in Period Billing to keep billing periods consistent across all of your contacts' services.

The prorate threshold day is applied when creating a subscription. If a service is purchased before this day, the contact will be billed up to the start of the next billing cycle, otherwise the service is billed for an additional full cycle through proration.

Time Travel

The Time Travel tool is available in Test Data mode and allows you to navigate back in time, and examine the behaviour of your Subscriptions and Billing model. With the necessary configuration in place, you can then move forward to the present and verify outcomes such as service billing, applied promotions, or pending changes, ensuring accurate and reliable billing results.

Billing Settings

Let’s start by looking at the Billing settings. While default settings are automatically applied when your business signed up, they can be customised as needed so as to build your own Billing model.

Navigate to Settings > Subscriptions & Billing. In this screen you can set up both your Subscriptions and your Billing model. Setting up the Billing model includes settings your Billing, Invoicing and Payments rules

Billing

Calendar Billing

Calendar Billing determines how the billing day is set on each subscription and allows you to align billing periods across all services within the subscription. There are two options to choose from:

• Anniversary - The billing day is based on the activation date of the contact’s first service, establishing the subscription’s ‘anniversary’ date.

• Period - All subscriptions are billed on the same day, as determined by your business.

Open

Choose one of the two calendar billing options.

Immediate vs. Delayed Alignment

When adding more services to a subscription, decide how to align their billing period:

• Immediate alignment: The new service is instantly aligned with the subscription’s billing period. As a result, the service is partially billed in the first bill and fully billed in the next.

• Delayed Alignment: The new service is billed for a full billing cycle, regardless of the subscription’s one. It is then aligned with the rest of the services in the next billing run. This approach ensures that your business collects the full payment amount for the new service.

Contacts can change their billing day at any time, but this option is only applicable for Anniversary billing models.

Resetting the Billing Day

This setting can be enabled only for Anniversary billing. Set up the events that automatically reset the billing day to ensure that changes result in full billing of the affected services.

Proration

Proration enables partial billing of a service when this is not used for the full billing cycle. Set the threshold day, a day of month that determines whether the service will be prorated until the end of its cycle or whether the service will be billed for one more, additional billing cycle.

Let’s look at an example where the proration threshold is set to the 15th of the month, and period billing is scheduled for the 1st of each month. The threshold is typically based on the timing of the billing runs.

Example 1 - If a contact subscribes on the 10th, which is before the threshold, the service is billed up to the 1st of the next month. It will be included in the billing run and pre-billed for the upcoming cycle.

Example 2 - If the contact subscribes on the 20th, which is after the threshold, the service is billed for the rest of the current month plus one full additional month. This ensures the new service is aligned with the rest of the subscription’s billing schedule.

Billing Rules

Billing is an automated process that is performed on a daily basis. Note that configuring its execution is not available.

At first, determine when subscriptions should be billed:

• On their billing day - Subscribers are billed on their billing day or

• Period before billing day - Bill subscribers a few days before their billing day. This ensures that multiple payment attempts are made - one per day - to collect money before the next billing cycle begins.

Then, if you are billing subscriptions on a post-bill basis, decide up until which date to bill them:

• On their billing date - Billed up until the billing date of each post-bill subscription or

• Up Until a cut-off date - Bill only up to a specified day of month, before the billing date.

Using a cut-off date is especially useful for businesses that regularly update prices of their post-billed services, ensuring billing reflects the correct historical pricing.

Example

Assuming that the post-bill cut-off date is set for the 1st of the month, and the billing day of a post-bill service is set for the 5th of the month.

On the 5th of the month, the service is billed until the 1st of the month based on prices that were valid up until the cut-off date.

Billable / Non-Creditable Service Sates

The various states of a service are classified as billable or creditable. CRM.COM has pre-defined behaviour on when a service is billed or credited. With these rules, your can override this behaviour.

Billable States

By default, only services in the Effective state are billed, meaning that services are billed for the whole period during which they are Effective. However, this rule can be amended to include services in other states, too, so that they will also billed. Optionally, set up these rules to apply rule to specific services.

Non-Creditable States

By default, a service is not credited for while they are in Draft or Effective state, while in other states (e.g. while they are Not Effective), they are credited. This behaviour can be modified to include additional states where crediting is not allowed. The rule can also be configured to apply only to specific services if required.

Business decides that when subscribers are deactivated due to debt, to not give credit back as away to apply a penalty. Therefore, the Not Effective state is marked as an additional billable state.

Usage Billing

Configure rules for managing usage-based billing (if applicable).

Open

• Verify remaining allowance on submitting usage records - When this setting is enabled, the system checks a service’s remaining usage allowance at the time a usage record is submitted by a third-party system. If the allowance has been exceeded, the usage record is rejected immediately. If not, the usage is accepted, but CRM.COM may later reject it asynchronously to prevent billing.

• Allow modifying a service’s Usage Allowance - A service’s default usage allowance is defined by its pricing terms. However, enabling this option allows users to manually adjust the usage limits - ideal for B2B use cases where flexibility is needed.

Usage Charge Limits

Usage charge limits are global business rules that set a cap on the amount of unbilled usage a contact can accumulate. Once this limit is reached, the system triggers an immediate invoice for all unbilled usage, even if the billing cycle hasn’t ended yet. Usage charge limits can be defined as:

• Maximum un-billed usage amount (e.g. maximum £50)  and/or

• Maximum un-billed usage records (e.g. up to 3 VODs, assuming each VOD generates one usage record)

These rules apply across all subscriptions and contacts and can be configured per individual (usage service) product or by product type (e.g., service type).

Open

Invoicing

Financial Rules

Navigate to Settings > Subscriptions & Billing > select the Invoicing tab.

Define the rules for how Invoices and Credit Notes are generated during the billing process. Optionally, select the financial transaction types to be used when posting billing transactions. When billing on a post-bill basis (e.g. usage-based billing).

Payments

Navigate to Settings > Subscriptions & Billing > select the Payments tab.

Payments Collection

During the billing, once the process identifies that the credit limit is to be exceeded with the new invoice, then an automated payment is issued. By default, the payment’s amount is the same as the invoice’s amount. You can optionally enforce the payment’s amount to also include any outstanding debt of your subscribers, enhancing thus your payment collection process.

Manage Failed Payments

On payment failure - i.e. failing to pay the next billing cycle due to credit limit being exceeded - the subscription is by default de-activated.

Payment Automations

Set up Automations to automatically re-activate subscriptions upon a successful payment or a top-up.

Reference Material

You may also find it helpful to refer to the following manuals for further reading about billing.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions

Product Catalogue

Product Catalogue

Orders

Orders

Contacts

Contacts

Payment Methods

Payment Methods

Time Travel

Time Travel

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