Managing an Acronis Fixed Price with Overage Subscription

Owned by Panagiotis Papanastasiou
Last updated: Oct 24, 2022
12 min read

This page explains how you can monitor the consumption and usage charges of a Fixed Price with Overage Acronis subscription and how you can cancel and upgrade such a subscription.

 

Viewing the Fixed Price of an Acronis Subscription

For a Fixed Price with Overage Acronis subscription, the corresponding information is displayed under the subscription view page in both BSS and Storefront.

BSS Subscription View - Monthly Fixed Price

By displaying the Monthly Fixed Price in the Subscription view, BSS users are able to view and compare the Fixed Price the customer paid and the Subscription Amount they have consumed. Note that this is not the current Subscription Amount but the estimated current Amount, which is updated three times per day. The Monthly Fixed Price field is where the predetermined Fixed Price is displayed on the subscription and is irrelevant to the Subscription Amount, Unit Price, or Final Unit Price.

 

Storefront Subscription view - Monthly Fixed Price

Also, in Storefront, the Unit Price is updated three times per day. Furthermore, the Monthly Fixed Price in the subscription details view page is displayed under the left-side sticky menu.

 

Fixed Price with Overage Usages Monitoring & Renewals

Usages are displayed live each time you click on the Usage Records tab under the Subscription view page. However, for Fixed Price with Overage subscriptions, at the end of the billing cycle, one of the following two scenarios happens:

  • Α debit invoice is generated with a specific amount that corresponds to the overage amount when the subscription total amount is higher than the Monthly Fixed Price
    or

  • No invoice is generated at all because the subscription total amount is lower than the Monthly Fixed Price for which a customer has already been invoiced.

As a result, the Fixed Price with Overage PPU usage is not displayed in the invoice as invoice items. However, the BSS users can witness the resources consumed and their charges, of the previous billing cycle in the corresponding renewals section of that subscription, in a separated tab called Billed Usage Records.

 

“Billed Usage Records” Tab

The Billed Usage Records tab is located inside the BSS under the subscription view page where the renewals section is located.

Until the billed usages are retrieved from the Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud Service Manager, the message No records found will be displayed in the Billed Usage Records tab.

When we receive the billed usages, and after the corresponding calculations are completed by the system, the usages are displayed in the following section

The columns containing the data of the Billed Usage Records are the following:

  • Code: Is the code of the unit.

  • Description: Is the description of the unit.

  • Billing Period: Is the period of billing for that unit that displays its date range from the beginning until the end.

  • Unit Price: Is the price of the unit consumed.

  • Unit: Is the type of the unit (whenever applicable).

  • Quantity: Is the quantity of the unit.

  • Total: Is the actual total price before any taxation is applied.

 

Exporting the Billed Usage Records

BSS users are able to export the billed items to an excel file for further use.

After the appearance of the list of usage records, an Export to action button is available, which exports the current view of the tool to an Excel spreadsheet. This means that this action does not perform any extra retrieving of data but rather exports all data of that tab from all the pages. The excel columns are the Code, Description, Billing Period, Unit Price, Quantity, and Total. The format of the name of the excel file is the following: "BilledUsageRecords.xls".

 

Canceling or Suspending an Acronis PPU Subscription with Fixed Price

Nonetheless, the cancellation, suspension, and expiration of an Acronis PPU subscription remain the same, and the documentation of those actions can be found on the Managing an Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud Subscription page.

 

Upgrading an Acronis Consumption-Based Subscription to a Fixed Price with Overage Subscription

If your customers have purchased consumption-based product subscriptions, you can upgrade them to a fixed price with an overage subscription, by following the generic upgrade process.
For being able to do this, you should first define and upgrade path between your consumption-based Acronis product and your fixed price with overage products.

Downgrading a Fixed Price with Overage subscription to a Usage-based subscription is not yet supported.

Upgrading & Downgrading an Acronis PPU Subscription with Fixed Price

Since the billing model of Fixed Price with Overage is adjustable and can be tailored, you can manually create as many custom Acronis PPU products with different monthly Fixed Prices as you need, based on your commercial policy and the monthly cost consumption of your customers. This way, you can offer
those Acronis PPU products, as upgrade options, to your customers with the flexibility of higher Fixed Prices with different levels of margin or markup profit. To achieve that, you can define upgrade paths for those custom-made Acronis PPU products, by following the guide on the Upgrade/Downgrade a Subscription OLDarchived page.


If, for example, your customers have purchased a Fixed Price with Overage Acronis subscription, having a fixed price of 100 euros, and they constantly pay for overage (over usage), they may wish to upgrade to a higher Fixed Price with Overage Acronis subscription, having a fixed price of 200 euros, that will have a lower level of margin or markup profit or vice versa. Therefore, from a business perspective, customers may want to upgrade a subscription when they notice that the total consumption is higher than the Monthly Fixed Price for a constant number of billing periods. However, customers may want to downgrade a subscription when they notice that the total consumption is lower than the Monthly Fixed Price for a constant number of billing periods.

 

Upgrade & Downgrade Rules

The upgrade and downgrade functionality of Fixed Price with Overage PPU subscriptions follows the existing logic of Consumption-Based PPU subscriptions except for the invoices that are created/generated for the Monthly Fixed Price.

  • The upgrade/downgrade action can take place any time before the end of the billing cycle, regardless of the subscription’s current total consumption, that might be lower or higher than the current Monthly Fixed Price.

  • The billing option of Fixed Price with Overage PPU products defines the manner that our systems handle the invoicing of Monthly Fixed Amounts. Detailed scenarios are described below.

  • Regarding a subscription’s billed usages, those are returned after the upgrade/downgrade (the next month for the previous billing cycle).

 

Upgrading With Invoice Examples

The following example scenarios, under the two distinct tabs (With Upfront Billing, With No Upfront Billing), analyze the upgrades between Fixed Price with Overage PPU subscriptions along with the respective invoices.

 

Upgrading a Suspended Acronis PPU Subscription

In BSS, when the user upgrades a suspended subscription, the new subscription remains with suspended status, but the user can activate it again through BSS.

 

Downgrading With Invoice Examples

The following example scenarios, under the two distinct tabs (With Upfront Billing, With No Upfront Billing), analyze the downgrades between Fixed Price with Overage PPU subscriptions along with the respective invoices.

 

When a monthly Fixed Price with Overage PPU subscription is upgraded/downgraded to one with a higher/lower monthly Fixed Price, the corresponding amount is updated on the view page of the subscription, in both the Storefront and BSS.