Creating and Working with Plan Templates, Plans, and Plan Groups - m3ter Documentation
Plan Templates in M3ter
You can use Plan Templates in m3ter to configure default settings for your Plans. Using Plan Templates can save you repetition work when setting up your Plans to price your Products:
- Firstly, Plan Templates allow you to configure default settings for general billing operations, such as the billing currency, frequency, interval, and any standing charge to be applied. Many of your Product Plans might share the same settings for general billing operations and differ only in the details of their pricing structures to suit specific Products.
- Secondly, after you create a Plan Template, you can then define a pricing structure for the template in the Pricing Editor. If you do this first, then any Plans you create using the template will inherit this pricing structure. This approach will be useful in cases where you have a range of Products that share pricing structures, but across the range of Products the only difference in pricing is the amount of standing charge you want to apply.
A Plan is based on a Plan Template and represents a specific pricing plan for one of your products or services. Each Plan inherits general billing attributes or pricing structure from its parent Plan Template. In a particular Plan:
- You can override some of these inherited attributes, such as standing charge, when you create a Plan.
- If the Plan is based on a Plan Template you’ve already priced, you can quickly edit the inherited pricing structure for the Plan in the Pricing Editor.
When you have created the Plan Templates and Plans you need for your Products, you can go on to configure the exact pricing structures for Plans you will need for charging customers that consume one or more of your Products. You can attach the appropriate priced Plans to customer Accounts to enable billing against those Accounts.
Pricing Plans and Plan Templates?
- Usage-based pricing. For details on how to price your Plan Templates and Plans using Aggregations for usage-based pricing, and how to edit a pricing, see Pricing and Managing Plans and Plan Templates.
- Unit-based pricing. For details on how to price your Plan Templates and Plans using Counters for unit-based pricing, see Recurring Charges: Counters.
In this section, you can review the configuration options for Plan Templates and Plans and learn how to create and manage them: