ServicePlans/RateCard
Contents
Overview
Rate Cards are used when selling telephony-based services and pertains to how usage charges are calculated. A rate card is a collection of rates. A rate defines what and how the system charges for a given call or type of usage record.
Rate Cards are attached to Service Plans that are for telephony service types, such as Optus Mobile, Telstra Mobile, Telstra eBill, AAPT Rebill, and other telephony-based plans. If a service plan is a data plan, or a plan that has no usage associated with it, you do not need to link a Rate Card.
Cumulus is very flexible and powerful when it comes to rating usage and caters for both simple rating (e.g. markup, flagfall) and complex rating (tiered rates) scenarios. For a detailed look into how Emersion identifies and rates usage, please see the Ratings section.
Concepts
Rate Cards have some specific concepts which need to be understood before you will be able to work with Rate Cards effectively.
Buy and Sell
Rate Cards are unique among the various billing objects in the system (such as Service Plans, Bolt Ons, Package Plans) in that Rate Cards themselves do not have a concept of Buy and Sell. Rate Cards are mapped to Service Plans which are either classed as 'Buy' or 'Sell'.
If you do not understand the concept of Buy and Sell plans, please see this article for further information.
Rate Profiles
Emersion's supports the following rate profiles:
| Passthrough | The supplier charge from the usage file is passed through to the customer |
| Markup % | Increases the supplier charge from the usage file by the defined percentage |
| Discount % | Decreases the supplier charge from the usage file by the defined percentage |
| Flat Charge | Applies a flat charge to the usage |
| Rate Per | Applies a price per time interval, with a flagfall, minimum charge, charge interval, price per charge interval, and price interval |
| Excess | Applies a price per time interval once the initial free time has been reached, with a flagfall, minimum charge, initial free time, charge interval, price per charge interval, and price interval |
| Simple Cap | Allows a maximum value to be applied to the usage, with minimum cost, maximum cost, maximum type (i.e. $ or time), charge interval, price per charge interval, and price interval to be defined |
| Capped | Applies a price per time interval once the initial free time has been reached up to a maximum value, with a flagfall, minimum charge, maximum cost, maximum type (i.e. $ or time), initial free time, charge interval, price per charge interval, and price interval |
| FF + Markup % | Applies a flagfall and increases the supplier charge by the defined percentage |
Tiered Rating
Tiered rating is achieved by using 2 or more "Steps". Each step will contain a set of rate configurations, of which would be determined by the rate profile selected - as per above table
- Only 'Rate Per', 'Excess', 'Simple Cap' & 'Capped' allow multiple tiers to be configured to charge at different rates at various usage limits on a single usage type.
For example, a rate per rating method for a telephony service, set with multiple tiers that may apply $0.25c Flagfall, $0.25c per minute (60 seconds) for a call up to a value of $2 (giving 7 mins (420 seconds) call time for $2), and then additional time charged at $0 up to 20 mins (1200 seconds), followed by simply charging $0.25c per minute (60 seconds) for the remaining call usage
Tariffs
In the Emersion domain, a tariff is a usage type with a friendly name. Common examples include Local Calls and United States Of America - Mobile.
Telephony carriers (such as Telstra, Optus, Vodaphone, etc) will create CDRs (Customer Data Records) and make them available for retrieval. Each CDR will contain a batch of usage records. A single usage record includes the tariff, call duration, and other information pertaining to the item so it can be billed. It is important to understand that tariffs are created and maintained by the carrier. Emersion also contains a list of all these tariffs and part of our maintenance of the system ensures that all tariffs from the carrier are in our system.
A Rate can be entered against a tariff or a tariff group.
Tariff Groups
Tariffs are hierarchical in nature and are grouped using Tariff Groups. An example of a tariff group would be International Calls. With an International group in place, all the tariffs for each country can be grouped under the International Calls tariff group.
Cumulus supports assigning Rates to a particular Tariff Group - such that all Rates linked to Tariffs contained within that Tariff Group, that do not have rates specifically applied, are rated as per the charge at the Tariff Group.
Consider the following extract of an example Rate Card:
* International - Charged at $4 per minute. $0.50 flag fall
- UnitedStatesOfAmerica
o UnitedStatesofAmerica - LandLine
o UnitedStatesOfAmerica - Mobile - Charged at $1.35 per minute, $1 flag fall
International is a Tariff Group containing UnitedStatesOfAmerica. UnitedStatesOfAmerica is also a Tariff Group containing the tariffs, UnitedStatesOfAmerica - LandLine and UnitedStateOfAmerica - Mobile.
If a service using this rate card incurs the Tariff type: UnitedStateOfAmerica - Mobile, they will be charged as per the rate explicitly defined for the Tariff 'UnitedStatesOfAmerica - Mobile' (as in $1.35 per minute, $1 flag fall).
However, if this same service then incurred the Tariff type, 'UnitedStatesofAmerica - LandLine' then Cumulus - in attempting to rate this usage - would see that there was no rate defined explicitly for 'UnitedStatesofAmerica - LandLine'. It would then loop up and look at its Parent, 'UnitedStatesOfAmerica' and see that there is no rate there either. At that point, it would loop around again and go to the parent of 'UnitedStatesOfAmerica', which is the Tariff Group: 'International'.
In this example, the Tariff Group 'International' has a rate associated to it, which is: $4 per minute. $0.50 flag fall. This usage would be rated as per rate assigned to the Tariff Group.
Base Tariff
The Base Tariff is a special Tariff Group that sits at the top of the Tariff Hierarchy for a given service type. All Tariff Groups and Tariffs for this Service Type sit underneath this Tariff
You are able to set a rate at the Base Tariff to catch any Usage that would ordinarily not be rated.
Typical Tariff Structure
Typically speaking, a group of Tariffs for a specific service type will be organized into the following Tariff Groups (Please treat this as a rough guide only. Specific Tariff Groups will vary depending on the carrier and Service Type)
BASE TARIFF (*)
* Local Calls (*)
* National Calls (*)
- National Calls may be segregated by distance (ie 0 to 50kms, 50 to 200kms)
* Fixed to Mobile (*)
* Special Calls
- 1300 Calls
- 1800 Calls
- InfoCalls
* International Calls (*)
- Country (*)
o Country
o Country - Mobile Carrier
(*) Indicates Tariff Group
Mobile based Tariffs may contain extra Tariff Groups such as:
* SMS (*)
* MMS (*)
* ROAM (*)
Maintaining Multiple Rate Cards
A Rate Card can be attached to multiple service plans, removing the need to maintain rate cards for each individual plan. In order to maintain the minimum set of rate cards that is required, Service Providers should spend a little time up front analyzing how many rate cards they require for both BUY and SELL, and eliminate the use of any superfluous rate cards.
How many Rate Cards do we need?
BUY Rate Cards
Service providers will purchase at least one type of service from a given supplier, but this often covers multiple service types.
For example AAPT Telephony <--- service type category
This service type category includes all tariffs for the following service types and AAPT products:
- Bizphone
- Call Termination Services (CTS)
- Inbound
- NWB-NBNPhone
- Reach 1300
- Rebill
- SIP
- SSaaS
- Special Calls (Alarm Monitoring)
In this case, service providers can enter all BUY prices for all these products in a sinlge Rate Card, then attach this rate card to all AAPT Telephony-based BUY service plans.
If a service provider purchases the same services from multiple carriers, but sells these services to the End User as a single product, a BUY rate card will need to exist for each supplier, as the tariff set may be similar, but not the same
SELL Rate Cards
To ascertain how many SELL Rate Cards you require for a service type category/service type, you will need to analyze how many customers are on different rates for the same product. This is not to be confused with monthly access fees or set up fees, as these will likely be configured against the service plan. But in terms of usage, customers with negotiated rates will need a rate card.
Emersion recommend that you start with setting up a single SELL rate card with your default rates in it. These can most likely can be linked to multiple service plans and subscribed to by any customer who qualifies for your 'standard rates'.
If you apply different rates for a group of customers, or for a specific set of plans, you will need a different rate card for these customers or customer groups.
The decision to create a new rate card can be determined by answering the following questions.
- Does this plan attract different rates than my standard pricing?
- Does this customer receive different rates than my standard pricing?
If the answer is yes to either question, you will need an additional rate card.
