Future Rate Versioning

Overview

Rate schedule versioning for Aria Billing Cloud supports accurate invoicing with positive or negative bill lag days, or for accounts created with a retroactive start date. This feature ensures invoices reflect the correct rate schedule version effective at the time of invoice generation, considering future rates you set in the product catalog when configuring services on a plan.

This article is currently being drafted for Release 67 of Aria Billing Cloud.

Prerequisites

Configure bill lag days.
Request that Aria Support enable the client parameter, VERSIONING_ENABLED, to enable future rate versioning. When set to "True", Aria will pick the appropriate service rate to generate invoices, based on product catalog future rate schedule rate changes, ahead of an account’s anniversary date to accommodate negative bill lag days. The actual change will not be reflected on the account until the effective date. When set to "False" (the default), Aria picks the rate current at the time of invoicing.
Click "Schedule Future Rate Change" when configuring the rates of services on a plan.
(Optional) Enable the Plans Activity log (Configuration > Client Settings > Miscellaneous > Plan Activity Logs).

Caveats

Plan Units: Not available for Plan Unit Instance functionality.
Sandbox Generator: Only copies current and future rate schedule versions, not historic rate schedule versions.
Manual Migration Required: Enabling this feature when you are live in production requires a manual migration of current and future rate schedule rates with the assistance of the support team.
Copy Config: This feature is not available.
Only One Future Rate Scheduled: To create another future rate, the date must surpass the future rate's effective date. Similarly, there can be only one current rate.
Retain Current Tier Structure: Future rate must retain current rate tier structure.
Copy Plans: Attempting to copy a plan with future rate change date of "today" or any time in the past will fail with an error.
Backdated Usage: Aria adheres to the behavior you specified for BACKDATE_USAGE_RATING.
Future Rate Changes and Negative Bill Lag Days: If Aria has already generated a Negative Bill Lag Days invoice for an account and the rate being changed affects that invoice, you can either:
- discard the invoice and regenerate it so the new invoice reflects the updated future/current rates, or
- re-bill the invoice, manually passing the updated rates.
Advance Invoice Proration Behavior: As a best practice, you should set the client parameter DO_FULL_ROLLBACK_ON_INVOICE_VOID to "True", allowing Aria to automatically delete any future or advance invoices during proration invoice generation.

Best Practices

[]

Use Cases

API-related Proration Support

You can perform various actions on customers' plans using Aria's API. Depending on the type of service on the plan, and dates you specify, plan change APIs can result in proration.

Aria picks rates for proration calculation based on various date fields, depending on which plan change API you are calling. The following table outlines various plan actions and the date fields related to proration for the various service types:

Action	Service Type	Comment (if more than one date present, the precedence is listed in order)
Assign	Recurring	The application will use the below input parameter for picking the rate version, else the application will make use of current plan assignment date a) alt_start_date b) retroactive_start_date c) alt_proration_start_date
	Activation
	Recurring Arrears	The application will use the below input parameter for picking the rate version, else the application will make use of current plan assignment date a) override_bill_thru_date b) override_dates_mp_instance_no/id c) alt_proration_end_date Note: For SP both (a) and (b) are not applicable, instead alt_proration_end_date can be used to override date, but its applicable only for plan instance that is of daily/weekly billing interval type.
	Minimum Fees
Replace	Recurring	The application will use the actual replacement date (current/VT) for picking the rate version. In case the user is passing any of these inputs, then the application will consider it a) alt_proration_start_date
	Activation
	Recurring Arrears	For Old Plan, it will be charged till previous day For New Plan, the application should consider the new plan’s bill thru date for picking the rates. In case the user has passed the below inputs, then the application will consider it for picking the rates. a) alt_proration_end_date—If valid inputs, then the applicaton will consider this input for picking the rate version, but it’s applicable only for plan instance that is of daily/weekly billing interval type.
Update	Recurring	The application will make use of this input “alt_proration_start_date” for determining the rate version, else the application will use the current (VT) for picking the rate version
Update	Recurring Arrears	For update units/rate schedule, the application will consider the bill thru date of the current plan.
Cancel	Recurring Arrears	The application will be calculated till previous date during cancel.
Replace and Cancel	Cancellation	For cancellation service the application will be calculated till previous date during cancel and replace action.
Replace and Cancel	Usage	During cancel and replace the application will rate usage till current timestamp. So, it will be using the current date for picking the rate version