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Overview

This article covers the steps to create a Rate Card in Emersion and adding a rate to a tariff inside the rate card. In this scenario, we will create a simple SELL rate card. SELL rate cards hold the pricing information that you sell your products and services at. Although we have not covered how to create a BUY rate card, the steps are identical with only a few varying settings.

You may or may not need to create a corresponding BUY rate card.

  • You will need to create a BUY rate card if any of your service suppliers are not an Emersion client.
  • You will not need to create a BUY rate card for any services purchased via a service provider who is an Emersion client.
This article does not cover Product Rate Cards or Account Discount Subscription Rate Cards.

Table of Contents


Create a Rate Card

Nav: Packages and Plans > Management > Rate Cards

This page shows a list of rate cards you have used or are currently using.

  1. Click the Create New button
  2. In the Name field, give your rate card a name. This name will be used only inside Cumulus.
  3. In the External name field, give your rate card an external name. External names may show outside of Cumulus, and should be treated as customer-visible.
  4.  Enter an optional reference name and reference key if appropriate.
  5.  Enter an optional description.
  6. Choose whether your new rate card is a BUY or a SELL rate card. In this demonstration, we are using a SELL rate card and will link it to a SELL Service Plan.
  7.  Select the Service Type Category that this rate card belongs.
This must be the same Service Type category belonging to any SELL plans that this Rate Card will be linked to. In other words, all SELL Service plans using this rate card will adopt the rates stored inside this rate card. Furthermore, Usage received will be rated against the rates inside the rate card.

We recommend you leave all Rate Cards in draft status until you are happy with the rate card, it has been peer-reviewed internally by someone else - hey we all make mistakes sometimes - and you are ready to sell your plans. Once a Rate Card has been approved, it becomes saleable. Once an order has been placed for a service that uses this rate card, it cannot be changed.

       8. When you are ready to proceed, click the Save button to save the Rate Card.

You will then be taken to the management screen of the rate card. At the top if this screen are the overview details you entered above. Below are two subtabs where you can:

  • Add a rate to a tariff
  • Link the Rate Card to a Service Plan

Once you have entered the prices against the relevant tariffs, and have linked the Rate Card to one or more Service Plans, your rate card is ready to use. Only once you are happy with all the below settings should you change the Status of the Rate Card to Approved.


Service Subscription Rate Overrides take precedence over everything else. It will attempt to rate in the following order:

  1. Service Subscription Rate Overrides
  2. Account Discount Subscription Rate Cards
  3. Service Plan Rate Cards
  4. Included Value fall back rate cards


Adding a Rate to a Rate Card

To add a rate override, start by selecting the tariff you want to add a rate for. There are two ways to search.


Step Through the Tariff Hierarchy

From the Select Tariff drop down list, choose a tariff or tariff group from the list. Users will see an << Add Tariff button appear to the right once a selection has been made. If there are more groups and tariffs under the selection, another drop down list will appear containing the tariff groups/tariffs under the group that was selected.

Users can keep stepping down through the tariff groups / tariff hierarchy until they find the tariff group or tariff they are searching for.

At each step in the search, users will see the << Add Tariff button appear to the right once a selection is made.

When the last step in the hierarchy is reached, no more drop down lists will appear to the right of the button.

Click the << Add Tariff button when you have found the rate that will be overridden.

Vertical View

Users can also inspect the tariff tree vertically and 'drill down' into a tariff group. By drilling down, users can see tariff groups and tariffs in a structure very similar to navigating through files and folders on a personal computer. The Emersion tariff id is printed on-screen inside the brackets, to the right of the tariff name.

To do this:

Click the Tariff Structure Hierarchy button. A pop-up window will open with all top-level tariff groups displayed. When you have found the tariff id you need, copy it, close the tariff structure pop up and enter the tariff ID into the search field.





Rate Fields

  • Once you know the tariff and have searched and selected a rate, the Add Rate pop-up box will be displayed

See this page for instructions for filling out the rate fields.


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 analysing 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 single 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 analyse 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.

  1. Does this plan attract different rates than my standard pricing?
  2. 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.


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