Using Price Books to Manage Discounts and Adjustments
As a Managed Service Provider (MSP) you can manage multiple child organizations simultaneously, ensuring visibility into costs and adjustments made for each customer. You can make adjustments to the cost such as markup charges for your customers, or apply discounts, based on contracts with each child organization. While you have limited visibility into a child organization’s data, you can still access key metrics such as usage and billing data, for services involving specific cloud vendors.
MSPs often receive discounts from major cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. These discounts enable you to adjust your pricing based on the contract with your customers. Typically, you can pass on a portion of the discount to your customers while retaining a part to cover operational costs and maintain profitability. For example, if you receive a 15 percent discount from AWS, you may pass only a 10 percent discount to the customer, while retaining 5 percent to cover operational costs.
To manage customer discounts, markups, and price adjustments, you can use a price book. By using a price book, you can have granular control over customer pricing and billing. For more information about price book, see About Price Book.
The following table describes the instructions, explanations, and reference information contained in this section.
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About Price Book
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Discusses price book concepts.
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Creating Rule-Based Dimensions to Group Organizations
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Describes how to create a rule-based dimension to view your organization’s cost data categorized in groups.
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Creating Price Book Rules
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Describes how to create price book rules to adjust costs.
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Verifying Adjustments in the Flexera One UI
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Describes how to use the Flexera One dashboard and Tabular View to confirm bill adjustments in the Flexera One UI.
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Prerequisite
Only after you have set up and verified bill-splitting, you can apply discounts and markups to your child organizations. For information on bill-splitting, see Using Bill-Splitting to Assign Costs to Child Organizations.
Role Requirements
The following roles are required for managing customer discounts, markups, and adjustments:
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Manage organization or Manage rule-based-dimensions
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This role is required to create rule-based dimension.
For complete descriptions of each role available in Flexera One, see Flexera One Roles.
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Manage organization or Manage bill adjustments
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This role is required to add bill adjustments.
For complete descriptions of each role available in Flexera One, see Flexera One Roles.
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Supported Use Case
AWS products receive various discounts under the Enterprise Discount Program (EDP), but certain products are not eligible for these discounts. In such cases, you tend to remove the EDP discounts from all products and instead replace them with a flat discount, excluding the ineligible products. You can also apply markups to accounts for operational costs, profit margins, and other services. Multiple price books containing various rules, effective from different dates, will be implemented and applied to groups of customers. For more information about price book, see About Price Book.
Tip:You should not enable “automated” EDP for their AWS bill, and instead use “aggregated” EDP. This approach ensures that you see undiscounted costs on each line item, and apply discounts as required using bill adjustment. You can exclude EDP discounts from being allocated to child organizations, while keeping them visible in their parent organization.
Important:To apply individual adjustments (such as currency conversion, allowing or negating credits) on the customer’s bill, you must apply this adjustment in the child organization using Bill Adjustment. For more information, see Bill Adjustments. For applying discounts, you must use Price Books.
Supported Dimensions
An adjustment rule's condition expression can check the value of any of the following dimensions: