• Fee Name This will be displayed during the user sign-up process, and this should be meaningful. For example, “$29.95 monthly” or ”$70.00 annually” would be good names for fees.
  • Period Length This sets the billing period for this fee, in months.

If you set the Period Length to be 0, then the user will have the product added only for the purposes of registration. The product then gets deleted immediately after the initial charges. This is useful for one-off charges (e.g. “On-site Installation” as an optional service).

  • Periodic Fee Sets the actual amount charged, (in dollars), per billing period, for users on this fee. For example, if you want to charge users  $40 every 3 months, you would create a fee with the Periodic Fee of $40 and a Period Length set to 3.
  • Initial Fee This is a ‘one-off’ charge, useful for those who want to charge a registration fee. If you do not wish to charge a registration fee, simply set this to zero.
  • Product code If you wish to differentiate revenue which is coming in from different products, you can do so by setting a ‘Product Code’ here. Line-Items on invoices will display this product code, and the ‘Revenue by Referrer and Product Code’ report will show the total aggregated revenue accruing from this particular product.
  • Rate Limiting This drop-down can be used to set-up rate-limiting for users on this plan, where appropriate and supported. The following standard limits are supported:
  • 1Mbs
  • 512Kbs
  • 384Kbs
  • 256Kbs
  • 128Kbs
  • 64Kbs
  • Active This check box determines whether the fee defined is actually available for selection by users signing on or using the plan to which the plan fee is attached. Fees cannot be deleted, however they can be deactivated. Once a fee has been ‘deactivated’, new users will no longer be presented with this fee option during the sign-up process. However the fee itself will still exist in the database. This is so that historic billing and auditing which relies upon the existence of the particular fee is never disrupted. This way you can slowly move users away from a particular fee until the fee is completely decommissioned, but maintain consistency with historic billing records.
  • Minimum Payment This sets the minimum amount a user may pay towards paying off this fee in a single payment.
  • Force Display If this is set to ‘yes’ (if the check-box is ticked), then this plan will be shown on invoices even when it is billing for $0.00.

Be aware that changes made to fees which are currently in use, like changes made to plans or bands which are currently in use, will be made effective immediately, and will take affect at the next billing for each user on this plan.  Also changes to payment options made part way through a user’s billing cycle will affect the next billing run for the entire period and not just since the change was made.