Configuration Workflow

The following steps summarize your configuration workflow in m3ter when setting up for usage metering to support pricing plans for your products, applying those pricing plans to your customer accounts, and running bills for those accounts.

Step 1: Configure your Organization

Configure Users for the people you want to grant access.
Create and configure Service Users for the automated processes you want to grant access. You'll need to do this in preparation for setting up any Integrations in m3ter with your 3rd-party systems.
Define the Timezone, Currencies, and Epoch for your Organization.

More Details? See Managing Organization and Users

Step 2: Create Products

Products act as containers for Meters, Aggregations, Pricing, Plans and Plan Templates.
You typically create a Product before creating any of these child entities.
Note that to meet your usage-based pricing requirements you might want to bundle or combine Products for consumption by your end customer Accounts. For these cases, you can create global Meters and Aggregations, which are not tied to a specific Product.

More Details? See Creating and Managing Products

Step 3: Create Meters and Aggregations for Usage

Create Meters with Data Fields and Derived Fields to collect usage data.
Create Aggregations based on Meter fields to define your pricing metrics - the units of measurements you'll use when pricing your Product plans.

More Details? See Setting Up Usage Data: Meters and Aggregations

Step 4: Create Plan Templates and Plans

Use Plan Templates to define general billing attributes, such as currency, frequency and interval, and any standing charges to apply.
Price up Plan Templates for common pricing structures to save repeat configuration work when pricing Plans.
Create Plans from Templates to inherit common billing attributes and pricing structures.

More Details? See Creating and Working with Plan Templates and Plans

Step 5: Configure Pricing for Plans

In the Pricing Editor, link Plans or Plan Templates to Aggregations and finalize your usage-based pricing plans for your Products.

More Details? See Pricing and Managing Plans and Plan Templates

Step 6: Set up Accounts

Create Accounts for your customers who purchase one or more of your Products.
Define any Child Accounts if you want billing for these Accounts to be rolled-up to a single Parent Account Bill.

More Details? See Creating and Managing Accounts

Step 7: Attach Plans and Create Prepayments for Accounts

Attach a pricing Plan to an Account for each of your Products consumed by the Account.
Select start and end dates to define the active period of the pricing Plan for the Account.
If required, create any Prepayments/Commitments agreed by customers for an Account.

More Details? See Attaching Plans to an Account and Creating Prepayments for Accounts.

Step 8: Submit Test Usage Data via Console

Open the Overview page for the Meter used to collect usage data on which the pricing Plans attached to an Account are based.
For a given Account code, manually enter some test values for the Meter's Data Fields.
Send the test usage data into the m3ter Ingest API using the Submit Measurements call.

More Details? See Submitting Test Usage Data

Step 9: Run Bills

Select Bill Frequency and Billing Period End.
Enter the Account for which you have submitted test usage data and run Bills for the Account.
Bills are based on the test usage data you have submitted and you can then check the Bill.

More Details? See Running, Viewing, and Managing Bills

Next: Integrations