Usage Pooling and Accumulation

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Usage Pooling allows you to pool usage across multiple services within the same plan instance to determine the rate to bill a customer. Usage Accumulation allows you to offer customers discounts on Master or Supplemental Plan Instances by accumulating usage beyond their normal usage billing periods, resulting in lower rates per unit at higher usage tiers.

Usage Pooling

Note: If you plan to rate usage Per-Record, you cannot use Usage Pooling.

Refer to the usage pooling example to see how invoice charges are calculated for a service with usage pooling enabled.

Once a customer has been billed for usage on a plan instance, you cannot enable or disable usage pooling for that plan. Usage pooling applies to Standard or Volume Discount Pricing Rules, not Flat Rate Per Tier.

Usage pooling works whether Aria rates usage at the time of invoicing or when usage records are uploaded into the system (real-time). If you load usage records into Aria with currency amounts assigned to them, your customers are billed based on your specified currency amounts, even if you have usage pooling enabled for those customers.

To set up usage pooling, you must first enable usage pooling, then turn on usage pooling at the plan instance level.

Usage Accumulation

Usage Accumulation allows you to offer customers discounts on Master or Supplemental Plan Instances by accumulating usage beyond their normal usage billing periods, resulting in lower rates per unit at higher usage tiers. This feature is compatible with:

Standard and Volume Discount Pricing Rules, not Flat Rate Per Tier, and
both real-time and time-of-invoicing rating configurations.

Note: If you upload usage records with specified currency amounts, Aria will bill customers based on those amounts, regardless of usage accumulation settings.

Enable and Use Usage Accumulation
Usage Accumulation allows you to offer customers discounts on Master or Supplemental Plan Instances by accumulating usage beyond their normal usage billing periods, resulting in lower rates per unit at higher usage tiers.
Enable Usage Pooling
This article explains how to enable this functionality via the client parameter "Allow MPI Level Usage Pooling."
Turn on Usage Pooling at the Plan Instance Level
Once you have enabled usage pooling in your Aria Billing Cloud configuration, you can configure usage pooling for individual accounts in Aria.
Usage Pooling Example
This article demonstrates how usage is rated over one billing period for a service with usage pooling enabled.
Volume Discount Pricing Rules With Usage Pooling and Accumulation
You can specify the Volume Discount Pricing Rule when using Usage Pooling and/or Usage Accumulation to price usage. This not only allows accounts to push usage units into higher tiers with lower pricing via Pooling and/or Accumulation, but also to pay the same rate for all usage units based on the rate schedule tier the usage units total falls into.