New commerce experience in Cloud Solution Providers (CSP) usage-based billing

Article
04/23/2024

Appropriate roles: Admin agent | Billing admin | Global admin

This article shows you how to access and understand your invoice and reconciliation data for Azure plan billing. Azure plan billing is easy, with one billing date and calendar-monthly billing periods.

Access your invoices and reconciliation files

The global admin or billing admin for your company receives an email when the invoice is ready.

To access the invoice and reconciliation file, follow steps:

Sign in to Partner Center and select Billing.
Select the tab Recurring and one-time purchases for the currency you're interested in.
Select Invoices or Reconciliation.

To view historical invoices and reconciliation files, see Billing history at the bottom of the page.
You can also download new commerce invoices and reconciliation files from the Billing overview (NCE) page.
Go to Billing overview (NCE) and choose the year > select the invoice number > find the invoice and reconciliation files on the side panel > select Download report.

About usage data

Azure plan the highest-level container for usage. All usage is linked to an Azure plan.
A plan contains one or more Azure subscriptions. You use subscriptions to manage and deploy resources.
Resource groups are a way to organize resources in a subscription. Every resource belongs to one resource group.
Examples of resources are like virtual machines and storage accounts.
Meters measure how much of a resource you use. A resource can have multiple meters for different aspects of usage. Each meter has a MeterId to identify it.

Hierarchy of subscription resource groups and metering

Azure plan:

Subscription A
- ResourceGroup 1
  - Virtual machine (resource)
    - Compute meter
  - Virtual network (resource)
    - No billing meter
- ResourceGroup 2
  - Virtual machine (resource)
    - Computer meter
  - Premium SSD-managed disk (resource)
    - Storage capacity meter
    - Storage operations meter
Subscription B
- ResourceGroup 1
  - Azure SQL (resource)
    - DTU meter
  - VPN Gateway (resource)
    - VPN gateway meter
- ResourceGroup 2
  - Virtual Network Interface (resource)
    - No billing meter

About your invoice

See the following numbers in the image.

Invoice is available by the eighth of each month.
Partners have 60 days to remit payment.
The billing period is a calendar month, for example June 1 to 30.
Charges are net of adjustments (such as "partner earned credit").
Review the invoice reconciliation file and daily rated usage file for more billing details.

About your invoice reconciliation file

The reconciliation data shows discounts or credits for each meter in the billing period. For example, a meter might have a tiered discount, or a partner earned credit (PEC). The PriceAdjustmentDescription attribute describes the discount and the effective unit price shows the price after adjustment.
The retail price (the unit price) is the effective unit price when no discounts or partner earned credits apply to a resource.

Read the daily usage file

Every day, Azure plan meters are rated to add up subscription costs.
Partner earned credit for services managed is applied daily on the eligible resources or subscriptions.
A subscription meter shows a line item for each day's usage if there's any usage in that month.
In the following image:
- Meter qualified for Partner earned credit for services managed from 7/1 - 7/3 (Note the effective unit price is the retail price less partner earned credit.
- Meter didn't qualify for Partner earned credit for services managed from 7/4 - 7/7 (Note the effective unit price is the retail price).
- Meter qualified for Partner earned credit for services managed from 7/8 - 7/31 (Note the effective unit price is the retail price less partner earned credit).

Azure reservations

You can buy Azure reservations under an Azure plan and pay once or monthly.

Azure savings plans

You can buy Azure savings plans under an Azure plan and pay once or monthly. Learn how to reconcile Azure savings plans.

How do you calculate the costs of a product that has both a fixed fee and pay-as-you-go charges?

To learn how we calculate costs for a product or subscription with both fixed and variable charges, see cost calculation.

What unit price do we use to calculate the cost of Azure reservations or savings plans?

You pay for Azure reservations or savings plans in your local currency. We use the USD price when you buy these products and convert it to your billing currency with the exchange rate. You can see the exchange rate in the corresponding reconciliation line item.

Effective unit price calculation for Azure plan pay-as-you-go

The effective unit price is adjusted at the meter level (as opposed to the resource level) based on how much you use.

We use these factors to calculate the effective unit price:

Daily usage throughout the billing period
Billable cost for the meter
Tier pricing (if applicable)
Partner earned credit (if applicable)

The effective unit price changes based on your daily usage and is finalized at the end of the billing period.

Find out whether your meter uses tiered pricing

If you don't know whether your meter uses tiered pricing, follow the steps to find out.

Sign in to Partner Center and select Pricing.
Select Azure plan pricing.
Find your meter by ID, and then download the pricing data.

Sample calculation

Here’s how to find the effective unit price in the open billing period.

The table uses these values:

UP = Unit price of the resource/hour = 0.868
BUU = Billable usage unit for the meter
BC = Billable cost for the meter = BUU * UP * 0.85, which accounts for the 15% PEC. To charge the minimum amount, we round the value down to two decimal places.
Effective unit price = BUU/BC

Note

The meter in this example doesn't have any tier pricing or discounts.

Date	BUU (Billable usage unit)	BC (Billable cost)	Effective unit price
3-Aug	29	21.39	0.737586206896552
10-Aug	210.950039	155.63	0.737757626107858
25-Aug	555.950039	410.17	0.737782122900436