Working with Balances for Accounts

You can create Balances for your end-customer Accounts. Customers can then draw-down against their Balance amount for any charges due for consuming your products and services throughout the period the Balance is active for their Account. You can include options to top-up the original Balance.

Using Balances for end customer Accounts delivers other benefits, for example:

Onboarding Balance/Free Trials. You can offer an onboarding incentive to new customers by way of an initial free credit Balance on their Account to be used within a set time frame but which carries no further commitment. This can encourage customers to start using your service by drawing down against the Balance, and increases the likelihood they will sign-up as a fully onboarded customer.
Balance as initial commitment. Add a Balance amount to a new customer Account to act as an initial commitment, which allows them to start using the service and gain an accurate insight into their usage level. You can then have a well-informed discussion with them about the most suitable usage-based pricing contract to suit their projected usage level.
Managing Customer Satisfaction. Use Balances as credits that will be applied to subsequent Bills as compensation for acknowledged service delivery issues, rather than using credit notes.
Facilitating Balance Adjustments:
- Apply negative amounts to immediately write-off outstanding Balances.
- When setting up to migrate data into the m3ter service create a Balance total, which you can then adjust to accurately reflect the Balance at the precise cut-over date.

This section explains how to create, work with, and manage Balances for your end-customer Accounts.

You can create Balances for an end-customer Account in the Console from the Account details page:

You can then add Transaction amounts to Balances to manage the amount available for drawing-down against charges due on the Account when Bills are calculated. Add single Transactions manually or set up a Transaction Schedule for Balances:

You can create Charges for Balances to create single, one-off line items for Balance billing. Alternatively, you can set up a Charge Schedule for a Balance:

You can run billing for either one-off Charges or scheduled Charges and view Bill details:

Running and Viewing Bills for Balance Charges

Important: Review First! Before setting up Balances for your end-customer Accounts, we strongly recommend that you first review the Understanding and Managing Billing for Balances topic.

Notes and Tips:

Note: Terminology? Balances, Credits, and Prepaid Drawdown, are all terms used to describe the addition of funds to an end-customer Account in m3ter.
Tip: API Calls for Balances? We maintain a full set of API calls to create and manage Balances for your end-customer Accounts - see the Balances section in our API Ref Docs.
Balances and Prepayments/Commitments? You can use both Balances and Prepayments to help manage credit for end-customer Accounts, but they serve different purposes:
- Use Prepayments for credit end-customers have agreed to pay for consuming your product or services across a full contract term.
- In contrast, Balances - often referred to as a Top-Up or Prepaid draw-down - serve credit payment use cases in a more flexible way. Use Balances when a customers want to add credit to their Accounts or when you as service provider want to add credit to Accounts - such as "Free Credit" sign-up schemes to encourage sales or credit rebates to safeguard customer satisfaction when there have been issues delivering your service.
- You can use Prepayments and Balances together on an Account, and control the order in which the credit is draw-down - Balance credit draw-down before or after Prepayment credit draw-down. See Balances Draw-Down Order Against Prepayments for more details.

Next: Understanding and Managing Billing for Balances

Working with Balances for Accounts

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