Setting up the Charging Plan

In earlier parts of this course you have learned about external accounts and how they are linked to contract accounts in SAP Convergent Invoicing. You know that a business partner can have multiple contract accounts, and as a result subscriber accounts can be associated with many external accounts. When a chargeable item is processed, the resulting charged items must be associated to one of these external accounts, so that they can be billed in the billing system.

The charging plan allows to implement a rule set, which helps to determine the correct external account to associate to each charged item. Let’s see how this works.

When you open a charge in SAP Convergent Charging the tree structure on the left of the window is separated into two parts:

1. The charging plan
2. The price plan

On the charging plan’s root node (selected in the figure below) you can configure several so called "charging references". Each charging reference can be understood as a placeholder for an external account, that will be linked to the external account of the subscriber account when a contract is created. As the external accounts of the subscriber account are unknown when the charge is designed, the best thing you can work with at design time are placeholders.

The charging plan tree structure is separated into three levels:

1. Charging component

Each charging plan starts with a charging component. This component references a specific kind of fee (one-time, recurring, usage). A default charging component is always available, which is used when there is no specific charging component available. When a chargeable item is processed by the charge, SAP Convergent Charging looks for a usage charging component and its subtree to associate the chargeable item to an external account. Is no usage component available, the default charging component with its subtree is executed instead.

2. Comparators/Operators

3. Internal Reference(s)

Any leaf of the charging plan tree structure ends with an internal reference component. The internal reference component refers to a specific charging reference, which will be translated into a specific external account at runtime. You will learn how this resolution process works in a later lesson.

With these three elements you can put together very flexible logics to determine the appropriate external account. The figure above gives an example, which associates the charged item calculated for a chargeable item to one external account when the consumption happens on a working day, and to a different account when it happens on weekends. The default charging component associates all other fee types (one-shot fees and recurring fees) to the external account all weekday usages are charged to.

Most of the time you will probably implement the simplest charging plan that is possible. It associates the default charging component straight with the only charging reference available:

In this video Melissa will show her colleague Jonathan, how to set up a charge, that implements the monthly recurring base fee of 1000,- € to support the cloud selection service. The price for the fee is not read from a table yet, as it would usually be in a productive scenario.