External Pricing Merge Fields for Reports & Notifications

Owned by Panagiotis Papanastasiou
Last updated: Nov 03, 2023 by Apostolos Karakaxas
4 min read

BSS users and operation teams can benefit from creating reports and custom notifications in order to better monitor the subscriptions that failed to retrieve their pricing automatically by an external system. On this page you will find the guides for creating both, via the use of the respective (external pricing) merge fields.

 

Analysis of the External Pricing Merge Fields

The merge fields that are utilized for reporting failures of their automatic pricing retrieval from external systems are the External Pricing Failure Reason, External Pricing Last Failure, and the External Pricing Status.

  • External Pricing Failure Reason: This merge field displays the message for the reason the external pricing failed (for example, “No Pricing Data”).

  • External Pricing Last Failure: Τhis merge field displays the date that the external pricing failed. It is not updated with any retry we make and it is always the date of the first failure.

  • External Pricing Status: This merge field displays the status of the external pricing (“Successful”, empty value (null), “Failed”):

    • Successful (status): This status means that the subscription is currently successfully synced as an external pricing subscription. If the subscription had its external pricing attempt failed in the previous cycle, it is now synced again.

    • Empty/Null value (status): This empty status means that the subscription is currently not an external pricing subscription. It may never have been created as one or its external pricing status has been removed via a User Price addition (example: Define a user price in Edit Pricing Info). A future request change will not be displayed until the next billing cycle runs.

    • Failed (status): This status means that the subscription is currently un-synced and an external pricing error has occurred. If the subscription has been successfully externally priced in the previous cycle, it is now failed.

These merge fields are used only for the base product of the subscription and not for the add-on.

Rules of the External Pricing Merge Fields

The types of subscriptions (with Product: prepaid, sub-subscriptions of bundle subscriptions, and back-ordering) that are currently covered and can be displayed according to their current “snapshot” are the following:

  • Prepaid subscriptions are supported by external pricing and are displayed accordingly.

  • Back-ordering subscriptions (for the root and the tenant) are displayed.

  • Bundle subscriptions are not supported by the external pricing functionality, but their sub-subscriptions can be and are displayed accordingly.

  • Trial subscriptions do not currently support external pricing.

  • Pay-Per-Use (PPU) subscriptions do not support external pricing.

 

Creating Reports for Subscriptions with a Failure in their Automatic Pricing Retrieval

In order to create a report for subscriptions with a failure in their external pricing, you must choose the “Subscriptions” data type, and then, at the 2nd step of the report’s creation, you can find the three aforementioned column fields (External Pricing Failure Reason, External Pricing Last Failure, External Pricing Status).

All three fields are located under the “Subscriptions“ General Columns.

At the 3rd step of the report’s creation, you can specify the expected status for the field External Pricing Status as illustrated below by setting the Operator as “is equal to“ and the value as “Failed“.

Creating Custom Notification for Subscriptions with a Failure in their Automatic Pricing Retrieval

The above-mentioned fields (External Pricing Failure Reason, External Pricing Last Failure, and External Pricing Status), are also available as merge fields when you wish to create a custom notification for subscriptions having failure(s) in their automatic pricing retrieval from external systems. Therefore, in order to notify and inform a specific BSS user from your operations team, of such subscriptions, please navigate to BSS Setup >Administration > Notifications > Customer Notification Details > Subscriptions, then click on the "New Notification" button, and apply the condition as indicated in the following example.

Highlighted in green color, is the condition you can utilize for this custom notification:

  • Entry = "Subscriptions", Field = "External Pricing Status", Operator = "is equal to", Value = "Failed".

The main body of the notification email should contain inside the generic text all three merge fields for a complete representation of the failure.

 

Advanced Search Module for Subscriptions with a Failure in their Automatic Pricing Retrieval

These fields are also available in the Advanced Search module of the BSS platform.