Creating Products

Creating and adding new products is crucial for maintaining your Catalog offering accurate and up-to-date. For this reason, the interworks.cloud platform offers a wide array of options that accommodate different product creation scenarios, from one-off products (such as setting up a managed service) to subscriptions  (such as an IaaS offering) and pay-per-use services (such as back-up).

Selecting a Product Type

An important characteristic when creating a product is defining its 'Product Type'. Although assigning a type is not mandatory, it is highly recommended to do so since Product Types are related to various settings pertinent to the behavior of the new product in the system.  

Creating a One-off Product

One-off products are those products or services that are purchased only once and can range from a server or a laptop to a managed service that must be displayed on your site. To create a new one-off product, as BSS user, you must perform the following actions: 

1. Navigate to Billing > Products. Select 'Add' and then 'Add Product'.
   
   

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2. There are several fields you need to fill in before you can add a new one-off product:

   • Define Product as: Here you define whether the product is a Primary product or an Add-on.

   • Description (mandatory field): The name of the product, as you want it to be seen by your customers.

   • Product Type: Select a product type if applicable.

   • Code (mandatory field): The code of the product, according to your internal scheme of assigning product codes.

   • Category: You can select a category for the product so that it is shown accordingly in BSS and to Customers.

   • Taxable product: Define if orders on this product will include taxation if the order customer is subject to taxation.

   • Industry: Another classification in case you want to relate the product with a specific industry

   • Unit of Measure: The default order unit for measuring the quantity of the product, e.g., number of software users or number of licenses.

   • Product Price Group: A product grouping element to facilitate price list configuration. In general, price groups are created to assign multiple products and then associate them with a price list. Check here for more information

   • Is Active: Marks the product as active, i.e. available to be provisioned. An active product can be published on Storefront and can be used in orders, subscriptions, etc.

3. Pricing: The Pricing section contains the information required for billing purposes:

   • One-Time Charge: Upon purchase, the system will charge this product only once. This is particularly true for one-off products.

   • Volume Discount: The product will be priced according to the applicable volume discount policy.

   • Available Currencies: The product will be available for purchase in the currencies defined here.

   • Unit Group (mandatory field): This property defines the basic unit in which a product/service is available as well as the different increments of the basic unit. For example, for a one-off product, the Unit Group can be defined as Credits, Hour, Day, etc.

   • Number of Decimals: Defines the number of decimals for the amounts of the unit group.

   • Activation of all Units: This option activates all the available units of the product's unit group

   • Sell Price: The retail price of the product, i.e., the price that will pay the end-user of the product. 

   • Purchase Price: The price at which you purchased the product from your vendor.   
     
     

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4. Click "Save" and you are done! Your new product is now created. 

Creating a Recurring Charge - Prepaid Product

Recurring charges for prepaid products refer to products charged in advance and at periodical billing cycles i.e. recurring subscriptions with specific billing cycles (monthly, annually etc.). These can be any SaaS software licenses, IaaS subscriptions or any other service that requires subscription billing. To create a new Recurring Charge - Prepaid product, as BSS user, you must perform the following actions: 

1. Navigate to Billing > Products. Select 'Add' and then 'Add Product'
   
   

2. There are several fields you need to fill in before you can insert a new product.

• Define Product as: Here you define whether the product is a Primary product or an Add-on.

• Description (mandatory field): The name of the product, as you want it to be seen by your customers.

• Product Type: Select a product type if applicable.

• Code (mandatory field): The code of the product, according to your internal scheme of assigning product codes.

• Category: You can select a category for the product so that it is shown accordingly in BSS and to Customers.

• Taxable product: Define if orders on this product will include taxation if the order customer is subject to taxation.

• Industry: Another classification in case you want to relate the product with a specific industry

• Unit of Measure: The default order unit for measuring the quantity of the product, e.g., number of software users or number of licenses.

• Product Price Group: A product grouping element to facilitate price list configuration. In general, price groups are created to assign multiple products and then associate them with a price list. Check here for more information.

• Is Active: Marks the product as active, i.e. available to be provisioned. An active product can be published on Storefront and can be used in orders, subscriptions, etc. 

3. Trial Period: click this option, if you want to enable trial subscriptions as well as to define the duration of the trial period. If the customer does not switch from the trial subscription to a paid one by the expiration date of the former, the subscription will be rendered inactive. On the other hand, the BSS admin has the option to extend the duration of a trial subscription.

4. Pricing: The 'Pricing' section contains the information required for billing purposes:

• Recurring charge - Prepaid: Upon purchase, the system will create a subscription for this product and will issue invoices for each billing cycle

• Volume Discount: The product will be priced according to the applicable volume discount policy.

• Available Currencies: The product will be available for purchase in the currencies defined here.

• Usage Charge Rule: In this field, you need to define whether the system will charge a license for the whole or only the partial billing period, in cases where a customer makes a purchase during the billing cycle. 

  • For example, if the subscription anniversary day is the 5th of each month and the customer purchases a monthly license on the 20th, a partial charge rule means that the customer will pay only for the remaining days of the billing cycle, whereas a whole charge rule means that the customer will pay for the full month.

• Term (Months): This field allows you to define a specific number of months during which the subscription will be offered at a locked price, even if the product changes price during that period.  Refer here for more information.

• Number of Decimals: Defines the number of decimals for the amounts of the unit group.

• Upfront Billing: The subscription will be invoiced in advance at the beginning of the billing period (for example, if a subscription billing cycle is from March 1^st to March 31^st, then the system will generate an invoice on March 1st including the charges for the entire March. 

  • If the box is NOT ticked, the subscription will be paid in arrears. This means that, in the example above, the invoice issued on March 1^st will include the charges for February.

• Billing Date: Defines the anniversary date for the subscriptions of this product. There are three options: 

  1. Apply customer's option: This means that the subscription’s anniversary date will be the customer's billing date. Should the customer not have a specific billing date defined, the subscription will obtain the order date as the billing date.

  2. Exclude from pro rata: The subscription will obtain the order date as the billing date, regardless of whether the customer has defined a billing day or not. 

  3. Set specific billing day: The subscription will have a specific billing day, regardless of whether the customer has defined a billing day or not.

• Free Period: You can define if the first period from order day until the first billing day of the subscription will be free of charge for the customer or no. Refer here for more information.

• Number of Decimals: Defines the number of decimals for the amounts of the unit group.

• Sell Price: The retail price of the product, i.e., the price that will pay the end-user of the product. 

• Purchase Price: The price at which you purchased the product from your vendor.  
  
  

5. Click 'Save' and you are done!

Creating a Recurring Charge - Pay-per-use Product

Recurring charges for pay-per-use products refer to products charged only when used which can be one or multiple times, such as back-up service. To create a new Recurring Charge - Pay-per-use product, as BSS user, you must perform the following actions: 

1. Navigate to Billing > Products. Select 'Add' and then 'Add Product'
   
   

   
   
   

2. There are several fields you need to fill in before you can insert a new product.

• Define Product as: Here you define whether the product is a Primary product or an Add-on.

• Description (mandatory field): The name of the product, as you want it to be seen by your customers.

• Product Type: Select a product type if applicable.

• Code (mandatory field): The code of the product, according to your internal scheme of assigning product codes.

• Category: You can select a category for the product so that it is shown accordingly in BSS and to Customers.

• Taxable product: Define if orders on this product will include taxation if the order customer is subject to taxation.

• Industry: Another classification in case you want to relate the product with a specific industry

• Unit of Measure: The default order unit for measuring the quantity of the product, e.g., number of software users or number of licenses.

• Product Price Group: A product grouping element to facilitate price list configuration. In general, price groups are created to assign multiple products and then associate them with a price list. Check here for more information

• Is Active: Marks the product as active, i.e. available to be provisioned. An active product can be published on Storefront and can be used in orders, subscriptions, etc.

3. Pricing: The 'Pricing' section includes information required for billing purposes:

• Recurring charge -Pay-per-use: Upon purchase,, the system will create a subscription and will issue invoices according to the consumption of metered resources per cycle, along with an optional premium per billing cycle.

• Volume Discount: The product will be priced according to the applicable volume discount policy.

• Available Currencies: The product will be available for purchase in the currencies defined here.

• Usage Charge Rule: In this field, you need to define whether the system will charge a license for the whole or only the partial billing period, in cases where a customer makes a purchase during the billing cycle. 

  • For example, if the subscription anniversary day is the 5th of each month and the customer purchases a monthly license on the 20th, a partial charge rule means that the customer will pay only for the remaining days of the billing cycle, whereas a whole charge rule means that the customer will pay for the full month.

• Number of Decimals: Defines the number of decimals for the amounts of the unit group.

• Billing Date: Defines the anniversary date for the subscriptions of this product. There are three options: 

  • Apply customer's option: This means that the subscription’s anniversary date will be the customer's billing date. Should the customer not have a specific billing date defined, the subscription will obtain the order date as billing date.

  • Exclude from prorata: The subscription will obtain the order date as billing date, regardless of whether the customer has defined a billing day or not. 

  • Set specific billing day: The subscription will have a specific billing day, regardless of whether the customer has defined a billing day or not.

• Sell Price: The retail price of the product, i.e., the price that will pay the end user of the product. 

• Purchase Price: The price in which you purchased the product from your vendor.
  
  

   

   

4. Click 'Save' and you are done!

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