What is a ZAB Charge Schedule?

A Charge Schedule dictates how often charges and billing should occur within a specified period. This feature defines the relationship between the service periods that are being billed and the bill dates for those service periods.

When creating a Subscription or Subscription Item, a user must decide a charge and billing cadence- will charges post monthly, quarterly, and how often do we want to bill customers for those charges- upfront, end of the month, 5 days after the service period end date? These are key questions to answer when first configuring a Charge Schedule for a Subscription or Subscription Item.

The Charge Schedule will interact with other fields on the Subscription & Subscription Item to define a pattern for the service periods & bill dates.

Key Characteristics

• Sits at the Subscription or Subscription Item level and is a required field
• Can be shared across many Customers, Subscriptions and Subscription Items
• Can be customized for an individual customer or contract

Charges are the granular records that drive our billing and revenue recognition activity. Each of the charges listed on the Charge table will land on a native NetSuite transaction as a line item.

Before you begin

• Determine if the Charge Schedule will sit at the Subscription or Subscription Item Level. Once determined, confirm Start and End Dates
• Determine Bill Date preferences- do you plan to bill at the end of the charge period or before?

A charge schedule is broken down by frequency and interval.

For example, a charge frequency of “3” and an interval of “month” would mean that the Charge Schedule is set to initiate a single charge every 3 months that reflects 3 months of service. To add another layer of complexity to this pattern, the Charge Schedule has options to specify initial bill dates and end dates to align with the calendar period.