Assigning Recurring Credits to a Licence
The Credit Packages you create will be made available as a Contract Service, which you can add to a licence. Please see Creating a Licence and Adding a Service to a Licence, for information on how these features work.
When creating or editing a licence, click Add Contract Service and add a credit pack to the licence:
Choose your previously created credit pack as the contract service
Pick the schedule for this credit pack (e.g. monthly will assign the customer this credit amount every month; weekly means they will receive the credits every week). They will receive the credits after the invoice has been approved. Therefore, for monthly packs, each month there will be an invoice which includes it all, while for weekly ones there will be 4 line items on the invoice, each charging for a week of credits.
Example recurring credits scenario:
For example, if you want to assign 10 credits per month on a licence for 12 months, you will need to create a credit pack for 10 credits with a lifetime of 1 month.
Then on Licence item, you will need to choose a monthly billing schedule, making sure that the From and To dates on the item are the ones within which you would like to provide credits.
Assigning One-Off Credit Packs to a Licence
You can also give your customer a number of credits as a one-off allowance, valid for a certain period of time (e.g. 12 months); for a one time payment. You can configure this as follows:
Build the credit pack to have the amount of credits you want to provide to the customer; as well as lifetime you need them to be valid for - for instance 10.000 credits for 12 months.
Add this credit pack as a contract service on a licence/
Under the schedule, choose “One-off”
When the invoice is approved, these credits will be assigned to the account with their lifetime of 12 months.
Configuring Licence Credits as Rolling or Expiring
You can configure Licence Credits either as rolling or as expiring.
Rolling credits can continue to be used after the end of the billing period they were allocated for. You can set up rolling credits by configuring the Credit Package (as shown above) with a lifetime that exceeds the Licence billing schedule. This way, credits will roll until their lifetime expiration. For example, if you would like to bill for credits monthly, but allow them to roll for another month, you can set the Licence billing schedule to Monthly, then set the Credit Package lifetime to 2 months. There is currently no possibility to limit how many credits can roll, but this can be kept in check using shorter lifetimes.
Expiring credits will no longer be usable after the end of the billing period. To achieve this, the lifetime of the Credit Package will need to correspond to the frequency of allocation (the Licence Billing Schedule). So if you want to allocate credits per month, and have them expire after that month, then their lifetime should be set to one month too.
Useful information regarding credits allocated to licences
Credits allocated to a licence will be shown on the customer's Account record when they are active. You can see the information in Member > Accounts:
No of Credits - the total number of active credits allocated to the Account.
Credits Remaining - the remaining number of credits, out of any active pack(s).
Credits Used - the number of credits that have been used / spent from the active pack(s).
If a licence is auto-renewed, this will extend the end date of all contracted services. Therefore, customers with credits allocated as part of a licence will automatically continue receiving them in line with the agreement, unless the contract service is terminated or deleted.
If you over allocate credits on a licence, please create a Credit Note using the Credit Pack as the product to be credited. Read more about creating Credit Notes here.
Credit packs do not automatically adjust for pro-rata licence months. Unless they are manually adjusted, the customer will still receive the full allocation of credits, for the full lifetime (i.e. 1 month) according to the credit pack that is applied.