Metered Billing

Metered Billing is the concept of charging your customer based on their usage. A subscription which uses metered billing has a base plan and additional charges based on the customer’s usage. Let’s look at Zylker Internet, which is an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to understand how metered billing helps them.

Scenario: Zylker Internet charges a particular amount for their standard internet plan, which has a data limit of 100 GB. If the usage exceeds the data limit, customers would have to pay an additional amount for it. Zylker Internet uses the Metered Billing feature in Zoho Billing to charge the customers for their additional usage.

In this page, you will learn about:

How does Metered Billing work in Zoho Billing?

Metered Billing has a base plan and additional charges based on a customer’s usage. These additional charges can be added to the invoice as line items.

When you create a subscription for a customer under metered billing, an invoice for the base plan is created and sent to the customer for the first billing cycle automatically. Upon subscription renewal, an invoice will be generated and will be in pending state. You can add the additional charges that you’ve tracked for your customer to the pending invoice as line items. You can do this manually in Zoho Billing or by using APIs.

Once you’ve updated the invoice, you can mail it to your customer. You can also charge them using the Collect Charge button if you have their credit card, bank account or Paypal account details.

Enabling Metered Billing

To enable Metered Billing for your organization:

Note: If you don’t want a new subscription to use Metered Billing, uncheck the Enable Metered Billing box in the subscription creation page.  

Editing & Sending Invoices

When a pending invoice is generated for a subscription, you would want to add additional charges based on the customer’s usage for that month. For this, you need to edit the particular invoice and send it to your customer or charge their credit card or bank account or PayPal account. You can do this in two ways:

Using Zoho Billing

Once you’ve made the necessary changes, you can either send the invoice to your customers or charge their credit card.

Using API

Note: Group Invoice option is not supported in Metered Billing.

Was this document helpful?
Yes
No
Thank you for your feedback!