Monthly Prices, more commonly known as Subscriptions, are the recurring monthly amounts you bill your customers for the services they purchase from you. For example, $30 per month for Hosted PBX Users or $30 per call path for SIP Trunking services. By default, subscriptions are billed in advance. So, the subscriptions included on a 1^st of the month invoice are for the current month not the previous month.

Each Monthly Price record has an Internal Name used to identify the record within your portal and a Name Visible to Customer that displays on transaction reports and invoices.

A Monthly Price should be added when a service is initially created and can have a Start Date of today day in the future. If you are creating the service in advance, so that you can proactively test and install, your desired start date is likely the day you expect the customer to “go live” and the day you want to start billing.

Newly added monthly prices will show a “pending” status for a short while. When a monthly price activates, the billing engine will prorate the subscription amount for the remainder of the current billing period. For example, if you activate a $30 subscription on April 16^th the prorated charges applied will total $15 and show a period of 4/16 – 4/30. Prorated charges are then added to the customers next invoice which is by default on the 1^st of the month.

It is common for a customer’s 1^st invoice to include prorate charges for the month their subscriptions activated in and their current monthly charges.

If a monthly price is ever removed or changed the billing engine will calculate a prorated refund for any amounts billed in advanced and automatically apply it to the customers balance. These refunds will reflect on their next invoice.

*Note: Because invoices are generated at the end of the month they will only show subscriptions that were already active before the billing period closed. This means that for a subscription to be included on the 2/1 invoice they must be active by 1/31. Please see Billing Process Overview for more detailed information.