Overview
This article covers the period approval options that are available and how to use them. Period approval is only relevant to the end of a service subscription, service feature subscription or bolt on / data bolt on subscription period. It will affected the production of arrears access fee and arrears usage aggregate cardlines.
In a business-as-usual setting, periods are managed by the system. At the beginning of a new period, the system opens a new subscription period and advance access fees are generated. This becomes the current subscription period. At the end of the current period, the period is automatically closed off by the system, meaning no more changes can be made to the period. After period close, a lot of system activity happens. Arrears access fees are generated and usage that has rated throughout the month will be aggregated and have usage cardlines produced.
All of this activity can happen without human interference.
Part of the process to mediate usage is to 'bucket' the usage. The term 'bucketing' refers to the placement of individual usage records into the subscription period to which it belongs. Once this has happened the usage is then rated. Only once a period is approved and then processed will any cardlines be generated representing the aggregated usage for that period.
- At the end of a service subscription period, the system will generate any arrears access fees (if the associated package plan is configured to do so) but only once the period has been approved - either automatically when the period was generated, manually via Period Manage or if the Period Requires Approval setting is disabled on the associated Service Plan.
- At the end of an account invoice period, the system marks the invoice period as processed. If pending cardlines exists at the time, it will generate an invoice. However, this doesn't necessarily mean it aligns with the service subscription period(s).
Subscription Periods vs The Account Invoice Period
Subscription periods for services and the account invoice period are different types of periods that perform specific functions.
The account invoice period refers to how frequently a bill is generated for the customer. Some companies prefer sending bills covering a calendar month. Others prefer to use an anniversary billing scenario where a customer who subscribes to their first service on the 22nd receives a bill covering 22nd - 21st of a month. Either way, this period between invoicing, is an overarching invoice period for the account.
Subscription periods refer to how frequently charges for the service are created.
A customer may hold several subscriptions to services that each have their own period relevant to the service being subscribed to. For example:
A 3 monthly subscription to a wine club has a period length of 3 months. Every 3 months an access fee is generated.
A domain registration period typically offers annual, 2 year and 5 yearly options. If a subscriber to a domain name pays for an annual subscription, the period length is 12 months.
The period length for a service is a setting on the service plan.
For customers whose only method of generating cardlines is via access fees and usage, and who elect to bill access fees in arrears, you may encounter a scenario whereby the system will not generate any access fee cardlines until such time as the associated service subscription period has been approved. If this period approval doesn't happen until after the third day past an account invoice period end date the resulting cardlines will not be automatically allocated to any Pending invoice and will not generate an invoice as the invoice period will now have been closed.
Manual Period Management
There are many cases where a company may want to intervene in this system automation and manage periods themselves. This is achieved via enabling the period approval setting on the service plan.
With the setting enabled, the subscription periods for any subscriptions for the plan will not be closed automatically by the system. They will be held open. A user will need to manually approve the periods in order to resume the automation activity and generate charges and invoices.
Do not enable this setting on a service plan unless you have analysed the impact to your business. If you are uncertain whether or not to use period approval, please contact the Emersion Support team to discuss if is the best option given your circumstances.
When this setting is disabled any service subscription periods that were previously not approved will now be processed.
When To Use Period Approval
Manual Period approval should be avoided where possible because of the additional administrative burden that can brings. However there are cases where it can be very useful.
During Onboarding
When onboarding Emersion's platform into your business, it is common to decide to stop the automation and manually approve periods whilst the project is in progress. This can be beneficial to avoid having to rush though the implementation phase and ensure the system is ready prior to the periods closing and the system kicking off the billing processes.
Services Backlog
It may be that you receive a large number of new services close to the time when the period is due to close and do not have time to enter them all before the period is due to close. To give yourself adequate time to get the services into Cumulus and have the system generate invoices for the customers with these new services, period approval can be used to temporarily stop the activity.
Where Usage is Not Available
There are some circumstances where usage will not be made available for our automated system to retrieve or you are notified that the usage will not be available by a the time the period is due to close.
Bulk Period Approval
If there are lots of periods to approve, consider using our bulk period approval tool.