Method: File, API, Queue, d/b access.

Type: Push/Pull.

Mapping: Request/Response Mapping for APIs, Payload mapping for Queues, file mapping. You don’t need to know the Embrix canonical model, Embrix will map your structures to its own.

Authorization: HTTP Basic, JSON WEBTOKEN, OAUTH2, Application/Session/API tokens.

User Management: Flexible User Management by managing permissions, roles and role Groups. Manage and maintain your user and user groups. Set up multi level approval configuration where required.

Jobs Management: Whether it is for your daily, weekly, quarterly or monthly sequence of jobs or if it multiple job schedules that run at a specific time during the day, Embrix jobs management has it covered.  Configure it to be fully automated or manage individual jobs as manual. Track and monitor job statistics for the most current up-date.

Operations: All your operations (manual or bulk), re-generation, re-processing, re-extracting are covered with the corresponding functionality supported in the core UI.

Correspondence: Keep your customers informed via sms and/or email of important activities, changes, reminders for a whole range of correspondence messages. Manage your correspondence templates with Embrix UI and Cloud Storage.

Flexible service offerings by bundling your multiple services, services from your partners or growing by acquisition. Flexibly offer bundle or package level discounts and promotions – e.g., bigger the bundle/package, higher the discount.

Trial management support – Realize your customer growth potential by offering your customers trials for the subscription or add-on services. Embrix offers support for both opt-in and opt-out trials with flexible trial terms.

Order management and order orchestration – Complimented by a functional CPQ, the Embrix order management allows you to seamlessly manage the customer orders and service fulfillment as a UI configuration. Embrix supports a wide range of order types including Cross selling, up selling, down selling.

Subscription KPI’s – Important KPI’s for your business like CRR (Customer Retention Rate), MRR/ARR (Monthly or Annual Recurring revenue), E-MRR/ARR (Expansion – monthly or annual recurring revenue with up-sell and cross-sell) and more are effectively managed with Embrix Subscription billing solution.

Do note that all of this is on top of what Embrix provides as overall platform capability. Refer the link here. We have you, your needs, and your growth potential covered with Embrix.

What is Consumption billing – Consumption based billing also referred to as usage based billing or metered billing is a billing and pricing model where customers are charged based on how much of a product or service they use, instead of a flat rate. Each such consumption usually results in a transaction that needs to be monetized and billed.

Verticals that use consumption billing – Consumption-based billing is used in many industries, including cloud computing, utilities, and telecommunications. It’s a flexible and cost-effective model that allows customers to scale their usage up or down based on their needs. This can be especially beneficial for businesses and individuals with fluctuating demands. With the emergence of cloud architecture and with it the support for SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, FaaS – consumption-based billing is being increasingly adopted by vendors and service providers.

Consumption monetization models – Consumption based billing can work in some of the following ways:

Tiered Pricing – Charge customers based on different levels of feature access or service usage. One setup could be that customers with the usage in the lowest tier is free and they pay higher cost as they move to higher tiers with higher usage volume.

Resource pooling – Allocate a certain number of resources for usage.

Monitoring – Monitoring and reporting based on usage.

Metering – Tracks usage in real time.

Pay As You Go – Fixed per unit price billed for each unit of usage.

Volume based – Pricing is based on a volume usage metric, such as API calls or the amount of data consumed. The units are grouped into payment tiers that contain increasingly higher ranges of units. As the number of units in a package grows, the price-per-unit drops, providing customers with an incentive to use more units.

These are by no means the only approaches that providers are taking when adopting a consumption-based pricing model but provides a fair bit of idea of the pricing models that are at play for consumption-based billing.

Advantages of Consumption Billing over Subscription:

Reduced capital and maintenance costs & less waste and overprovisioning.

Incentivized vendor support.

Faster and easier scaling and Simpler system design.

For customers, they pay based on value provided and received. Without the consumption-based model, it is almost impossible for the customer to understand if they are paying the right subscription pricing or are overpaying.

Revenue Recognition options – Complimented by product family and item master within Embrix, all the revenue recognition models that are required for usage processing are supported in Embrix. This includes ASC-606 for long running contracts.

Usage Suspense management – Whether it is based on the quality of the usage transaction data received or gap in synchronization of the usage pricing with orders and subscription, some usage transactions can be suspended (not processed further). Embrix Mediation and Usage processing provides the Usage Suspense manager to view, rectify and manage the suspended usage transactions before re-processing.

Re-rating/Re-billing – Because of synchronization issues with potentially incorrect pricing and subscription setup and at other times because of erroneous processing, it is possible that transactions are monetized wrongly. To fix that requires re-monetizing the transactions. Embrix supports backout only processing of a batch of transactions (so that a new corrected batch can be sent for processing again) and re-rating that manages the re-monetization of billed and unbilled transactions.

Verticals that use consumption billing – Hybrid billing applies more to verticals that use Consumption-based billing including cloud computing, utilities, and telecommunications. Even financial institutions and credit unions offer their services based on hybrid billing models.

Hybrid billing monetization models – Consumption based billing can work in some of the following ways:

Subscription fee with consumable grant & overage pricing – A customer is given a consumable grant for the subscription fee in the form of free volume, free minutes, free $ in some relation to the actual subscription fee. As the usage transactions are monetized the grant is consumed and when the available grant is exhausted in the period, the overage or usage-based pricing takes over. The consumable grant can be shared across account hierarchy or with other account structures (e.g., Friends and Family setup).

Subscription fee & overage pricing – This is different from the earlier model that there is no consumable grant provided and instead the transactions are not rated or zero rated up to a set limit before the overage or usage-based pricing takes over. The difference lies more in how the subscription fee revenue needs to be recognized.

Commitment models – B2B or large customers can go into a commitment contract for a set period referred to as the commitment term. The commitment can be for a currency limit of how much is billed during the commitment term or volume of usage during the commitment term. Examples are 1.2Million$ commitment of revenue over a year or 120 million units of usage over a year. For such a model, the customer is billed regularly with their consumption-based models. The only difference is that the relevant usage value is tracked over a commitment period. At the end of the commitment period, if the customer does not meet his commitment, then the customer is billed the shortfall as a True-up (subscription).

Item (BOM) split – When the subscription fee is a combined subscription fee for multiple services or in the case of true-up, the finance team can use the item split configuration to split the revenue based on a predefined percentages. This percentage split can be reviewed periodically (e.g., every quarter or half yearly) and the percentages can be adjusted to match a ratio closer to the actual servicee split in the previous term.

Revenue Recognition options – Hybrid Billing models require a different set of revenue recognition models as compared to pure Usage based or subscription-based billing models. Embrix supports the following

• Deferred – The subscription revenue with a grant is marked as Deferred Revenue.
• Revenue on Deferral (Auto) – As the grant resources are consumed, apportioned deferred subscription revenue is recognized automatically.
• Revenue on Deferral (Manual) – In some cases there may be external triggers to recognize the deferred subscription revenue. For example, based on physical service delivery which can be managed by the finance team using this method of revenue recognition.
• True-up – With commitment models, the short-fall is billed as a true-up revenue recognition type.

Embrix provides a rich feature set to support prepaid billing.

Prepaid term – Embrix supports flexible prepaid terms as ‘n’ units in days, months and more.

Top ups – Embrix provides support for,

• Multiple top-ups during the prepaid term depending on the service usage levels. 
• Set up of a minimum top-up amount for the first and same/different minimum top-up for each subsequent top-up in  a prepaid term. This can be based on some set factors or auto calculated based on an equation that uses the customers’ historical data and positive balance, if any.
• Customers have an option to top up for an amount greater than the minimum set in which case the available balance can roll-over to the next prepay term.

Draw-down – Embrix automatically manages the draw-down from the top-up balance for each usage transaction ensuring the real-time tracking of the remaining balance.

Customer correspondence – Embrix supports different SMS and Email message templates for different thresholds and a different message for the first or subsequent top-ups during the prepayment term. Embrix correspondence templates can include the corresponding minimum top-up amounts.

Suspension of service – Embrix allows a configuration to auto suspend the service when the customer does not have sufficient available balance for service usage during the prepayment term. Alternatively, Embrix allows configurable period during which the service suspension should happen. This is typically done where customers do manual top-ups, so that the customers can do those manual top-ups during working hours. Note that  this also means that the customer can incur a positive balance in between the transaction that breached the balance and the peak hours when the service can be suspended.

Resumption of service – With a subsequent top-up, Embrix can automatically resume the suspended services.

Get Top Up – In light of potential complex rules around minimum top-up amounts and suspension window, Embrix provides an API that can provide the top-up amount details to the customer and/or use it as customer correspondence content.

True up – For the initial minimum top-up, Embrix supports the term end true-up of revenue, if the minimum top-up balance is not used fully at the end of the prepayment term.

Invoices – Usually invoices are not required for prepaid billing. However, some service providers may require the generation of a physical invoice. This may also be required if there are positive balances that the customers owe. Additionally, in many LATAM countries the invoice must be generated, stamped by the authorities from a local country regulatory point of view. This is almost treated as a tax invoice and Embrix supports this functionality.

Auto scaling with Cloud Micro Services Architecture 

Embrix is a complete cloud micro-services architecture where the micro services are designed for intended use and hence allows Embrix to scale these micro services independently. The micro services scale up automatically and when the activity is finished or there is no more load, each micro service will scale down automatically to a configured minimum.

Some examples of how Embrix micro services can scale:

Billing or invoicing of 5 million customers on 5th of the month and 25,000 customers on 6th of month (scale slightly and scale down) – only scale up and down only Billing and Invoicing micro-services automatically.

Usage mediation volume of 2-3 billion transactions per month – only scale the mediation service as required automatically.

Rating and usage processing for few hundred million transactions per month (scale the usage processing micro-service automatically.

At the end of the month a few hundred users access the UI for month end close activities – only scale the UI and transactional service automatically.