Understanding Usage Products

Pax8 has two types of products when it comes to billing unit of measure: 1) seat or device based products, and 2) usage based products.

Seat or device based products are billed per computer or device the software is installed on. They are generally billed in advance and billing can be estimated through software price per seat multiplied by cost per seat. An example would be Microsoft Office.

Usage based products are billed based on amount of something used. They are generally billed after usage happens so what we refer to as an arrears based product. An example would be Microsoft Azure.

How to Identify Usage Based Products?

The "unit of measure" and "type" fields can be used to identify usage based products. Calling our pricing endpoint: https://devx.pax8.com/reference/findpricingbyproductid and looking for unit of measure that is noted as X and type that is noted as Y can identify

How Usage is Captured & Billing Complications

Pax8 vendors that offer usage products via the Pax8 marketplace, send usage reporting to Pax8 on a periodic basis. This usage is then queryable by Pax8 partners.

Most times the breakdown of usage by company from a given Pax8 vendor is not the same as how a Pax8 partner sets up companies on the Pax8 side. Therefore Pax8 partners must go into the Pax8 portal and do a one time linking of Pax8 companies to vendor entity/companies. This should only be a one time process and can be done by partners by going into the Pax8 app, navigating to the usage summaries section, and clicking on the three dots at the end of a given usage summary row. That will create a link between the vendor entity and the Pax8 company. Pax8 partners will need to do this anytime they have a new vendor entity or if new usage vendors are purchased via the Pax8 marketplace.

The only product exception to this requirement for manual linking between vendor entities and Pax8 companies is Azure which should already have accurate links in place due to tenant id mappings.

If a Pax8 partner has not mapped vendor entities to Pax8 companies in the Pax8 app, all usage data for a given vendor will show up at the partner level making correct billing very difficult.

Public Usage Endpoints for Partners

There are two usage endpoints that partners can use to monitor mid month usage for usage based products. The first allows you to pull usage summaries which are high level usage details for Pax8 products: https://devx.pax8.com/reference/findsubscriptionusagesummaries. The second allows you to pull more granular usage details or line items for a given usage summary: https://devx.pax8.com/reference/findusagelines

Although usage summaries are also available in the Pax8 portal, they differ from data available via our endpoints because you can't pull historic usage summaries via the API endpoints (only current calendar month).

Further, end of month invoice line items can also be used to monitor end of month usage for usage products: https://devx.pax8.com/reference/findpartnerinvoiceitems