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  2. MATRIXX Pricing and Rating
  3. Pricing

  4. Pricing Plans

    Pricing plans define the pricing and policies that allow you to control how you provide services to subscribers and how you are paid for those services. Pricing plans are comprised of catalog items, offers, bundles, and supporting objects required to implement pricing.

  5. Balances and Meters

    When you define rates, you specify which balances and meters to impact when rating occurs. The impacts are a result of the price components applied, and represent the financial liabilities to subscribers and groups.

  6. Dynamic Balances and Meters

    Balance and meter instances can be created dynamically in response to network usage events. A dynamic balance can be simple or periodic, and can represent a quantity of a currency or an asset. A dynamic meter can track charge amount, discount amount, or usage quantity.

  7. Dynamic Balance and Meter Restrictions

    The following restrictions apply to dynamic balances and meters.

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  • MATRIXX Pricing and Rating
    • About Pricing and Rating

      MATRIXX Pricing and Rating provides an introduction to MATRIXX pricing and rating functionality and describes how to define the catalog components necessary for rating and policy selection. It also provides an overview of the MATRIXX rating process and an introduction to My MATRIXX, a web-based user interface application you use to create and manage product catalogs.

    • Rating

      The following information describes MATRIXX Charging Application rating functionality.

    • Pricing

      • Pricing Overview

        The MATRIXX pricing model is highly flexible and enables you to create innovative service offerings and tailor pricing to subscriber needs. It is compatible with the TM Forum (TMF) Shared Information/Data (SID) model.

      • Pricing Data

        The MATRIXX Engine pricing data model is compatible with the Shared Information/Data (SID) standard, as defined by the TM Forum (TMF).

      • Pricing Corrections and Revisions

        Make corrections and revisions to all pricing items except balance classes, meter classes, balances, meters, and products. For information about product offer versions, see the discussion about product offers.

      • Updating Pricing After Purchase

        Not all pricing items can be updated after pricing is loaded and subscribers are using it.

      • Pricing Plans

        Pricing plans define the pricing and policies that allow you to control how you provide services to subscribers and how you are paid for those services. Pricing plans are comprised of catalog items, offers, bundles, and supporting objects required to implement pricing.

        • Balances and Meters

          When you define rates, you specify which balances and meters to impact when rating occurs. The impacts are a result of the price components applied, and represent the financial liabilities to subscribers and groups.

          • Balances

            A balance is a quantity of a currency or asset that is used for tracking and charging for service usage and service-related operations, such as recurring cycle fees.

          • Meters

            A meter is a non-financial counter that tracks service usage, charges to a balance, balance amounts, discount amounts, or the overdraft amount of a set of balances.

          • Simple Balances and Meters

            Simple balances and meters use one balance or meter instance for the entire validity period of the balance or meter. As rating occurs against the instance, the value can increase and decrease according to the applied charges, discounts, or grants.

          • Smart Balances and Meters

            A smart balance or smart meter has one or more associated filters. The filters act like policies that determine whether it is examined for validity during rating so it can be used.

          • Dynamic Balances and Meters

            Balance and meter instances can be created dynamically in response to network usage events. A dynamic balance can be simple or periodic, and can represent a quantity of a currency or an asset. A dynamic meter can track charge amount, discount amount, or usage quantity.

            • Dynamic Balance and Meter Key Field Definitions

              A dynamic balance or meter template consists of a list of key field definitions, each of which can be either a field name or a matrix. A separate instance is created for each unique combination of values from the specified field names or matrices.

            • Dynamic Balance Base and Dynamic Balance Instance

              A dynamic balance instance can be a balance or meter, can represent a quantity of a currency or an asset, and can be simple or periodic. For periodic balances, the instance has period boundaries and a sliding window until the end time.

            • Dynamic Balance Policy Evaluation

              When dynamic balance key values are related to device location, for example, country or region, or are related to time, charges to such balances or the available amount of balances with specific key values might trigger policy reevaluation of a dynamic balance instance.

            • Dynamic Balance and Meter Validity Time

              The start and end time of a dynamic balance base is specified by the selected Start and End options in dynamic balance and dynamic meter templates. When the dynamic balance base expires, it can no longer create dynamic balance instances. You can adjust the dynamic base validity time using the AdjustBalance SubMan API.

            • Dynamic Balance and Meter Restrictions

              The following restrictions apply to dynamic balances and meters.

            • Dynamic Balance and Meter Events and Notifications

              When a dynamic instance is created, an MtxDynamicBalanceInstanceCreateEvent is generated. This event contains the dynamic balance instance key values. When a dynamic balance instance is updated, the event includes a balance update record which contains the dynamic balance instance key values. For more information, seee the discussion about MtxDynamicBalanceInstanceCreateEvent in MATRIXX Integration.

            • Daily Roaming Pass for Multiple Countries Example

              In this example, a subscriber has a daily roaming pass allowance of 500MB per visited country for a 24-hour period.

          • Balance and Meter Notifications

            Configure notifications to be triggered when balances and meters are created and expire, when they reach a threshold amount and credit limit, and when a recurring processing failure occurs. The threshold settings are not mutually exclusive — any combination of notifications can be specified for any balance or meter template.

          • Balance and Meter Adjustments

            An adjustment is a subscriber management transaction that can debit or credit a subscriber or group balance, increase or decrease a meter, or change the start time of a balance. customer service representatives (CSRs) typically perform them on behalf of a subscriber to reconcile an incorrect charge or a service complaint.

          • Device-Specific Balances and Meters

            Device-specific balances and meters track currency or other assets for a device. Their balance impacts are recorded in a subscriber'swallet with a device association. Device-specific balances and meters are particularly useful for prepaid applications, such as topping-up a device with resources.

          • Group-Owned Balances and Meters

            All balances associated with a product offer that was purchased by a group can be shared by group members or limited to the group owner. The balances can be allocated across devices to enable family sharing plans, corporate asset pools, and the like, and enable service providers a way to enforce spend control on services and track member usage.

          • Balance and Meter Quantity Units

            Quantity units specify the measurement in which a balance or meter amount is stored.

          • Balance and Meter Precision

            Balances and meters have precision values that determine how quantities are handled before they are applied to the balance or meter.

        • Thresholds and Credit Limits

          Create thresholds and credit limits when you create or change balances and meters.

        • Decision Tables

          Decision tables consist of a number of _glossary/normalizer.html columns that define a set of business logic (one or more condition sets) that can be reused in different circumstances. Decision tables can be combined with a set of results into any type of component table, such as a policy table, rollover table, rate table, _glossary/gl_transaction_type.html table and account table, filter, or priority generator.

        • Contracts

          You can create finance or service contracts. A finance contract defines the terms and conditions of a contract. A service contract defines the terms and charges for a service, for example, voice or data.

        • Final Unit Indication

          You can configure Diameter Final Unit Indication (FUI) information to be static or dynamic.

        • Announcements Components

          MATRIXX Engine uses announcement pricing components for determining the list of announcements to play to a subscriber during a voice call, and the language they must be played in. You configure announcement data to be dynamic, so a different result occurs based on conditions that are valid at the time of rating.

        • Data Modifying

          You use the data modify interface in My MATRIXX to configure data modify actions, data modify profiles, and data modify profile selectors.

        • Filters

          Filters are independent, reusable, pricing items that can be associated with balances, meters, subscription product offers, and notifications.

        • Normalizer Templates

          Normalizer templates identify the MATRIXX Data Container (MDC) and its fields, catalog item parameters, balances, quantities, or times that are normalized during rating to determine which rates to apply. The fields can be located in a network message or in a MATRIXX database MDC, such as a subscriber, device, group, or purchased offer MDC.

        • Normalizer Instances

          Normalizer instances condense large sets of discrete field values into a manageable set of parameters. Each parameter represents the aggregate value set, so that assigning a result to every possible field value is not required.

        • Parameters

          You can configure definitions for parameters that you can use in pricing items such as catalog items, bundles, product offers, and price components.

        • Products

          A product represents the provisioning of a service type when a _glossary/catalog_item.html is purchased for a _glossary/subscription.html, _glossary/device.html, or _glossary/group.html. The products identify the service type, which in turn determines the pricing that can apply.

        • Catalog Items

          Catalog items are customizations of offers and bundles that are offered to a specific group of subscribers.

        • Catalogs

          A catalog contains catalog items and eligibility rules. The eligibility rules determine which catalog items are included or excluded from the catalog. You can also add metadata fields to further define the catalog.

        • Eligibility

          Eligibility rules define requirements and exclusions.

        • Product Offers

          Product offers are the basis for the pricing components that subscriptions, groups, and devices purchase, either singly or in bundles.

        • Bundles

          Bundles group one or more product offers together so they can be purchased as a unit. You can also create bundle-specific charges, grants, and discounts that override or supplement the existing price components defined in individual product offers.

        • Price Components

          MATRIXX price components are reusable pricing items that can be included in any number of product offers. They include charges, discounts, grants, refunds, and forfeitures.

        • Policies

          Policies provide the business logic for real-time policy decisions and rules, allowing you to track subscribers' service usage in real-time and change the behavior of a service based on that usage (for example, by throttling bandwidth).

        • Inbound Roaming

          Configure inbound and emergency roaming requests to define the agreements with third-party operators that allow requests for subscribers that are not identified in MATRIXX.

        • Denial Codes

          Denial codes are a way to deny service access to subscribers for a specific reason. You define them in My MATRIXX and add them to rate table rows in place of a rating formula, so the value is returned to the network based on the row selected during rating.

        • Offer Life Cycle Profiles

          An offer life cycle profile consists of a set of offer statuses, a set of policies associated with each offer status that describe behavior that can be executed in this status, and a set of transitions that can have conditions defined that can trigger a transition and actions defined that are executed after the transition is performed. Both offers and bundles can have an offer life cycle profile defined. Use offer life cycle profiles to customize the behavior of MATRIXX for your business processes.

        • Status Life Cycles

          A status life cycle is a collection of object states, policies, and transition rules that are defined for a specific object type. You can define a status life cycle for user, device, subscription, group, and offer objects to customize the behavior of MATRIXX for your business processes. For example, a device life cycle can begin with a provisioned status, transition to an active status, and finally transition to an inactive status.

        • Status Notification Profiles

          Notification profiles are reusable pricing components that define when expiration and recurring processing failure notifications are sent and the frequency with which those notifications are sent. Notification profiles can be assigned to each status in status life cycles. For a complete list of possible notifications, see the discussion about notifications in MATRIXX Integration.

        • System Attributes

          System attributes are custom properties you can attach to product offers, price components, rate tables, and rate table rows to add metadata to the object in the pricing database. They contain a mapping of attribute values to _glossary/mdc.html fields. The MDC fields get populated with the attribute values during rating and returned to the network in an MDC message.

        • Virtual Fields

          You use virtual fields to avoid creating multiple pricing configurations if your MATRIXX environment accepts multiple rating message types, for example, messages from Diameter and 5G networks.

        • Usage Triggers

          Use usage triggers to add lists of re-authorization triggers to the charging response messages for a session or rating group. Usage triggers are available for both Diameter Gy and 5G charging messages.

        • Usage Trigger Gy and 5G AVPs

          You trigger re-authorization for a session or rating group by assigning the Diameter Gy Trigger-Type and 5G triggerType AVP values listed here to usage trigger profiles.

        • Metadata

          Metadata summarizes basic information about other data and makes working with specific data easier. Metadata provides information about pieces of information that have meaning in relation to another piece of information in My MATRIXX.

      • Planning a Pricing Plan

        Before you create a _glossary/pricing_plan.html, determine how you want to name, organize, and set up the items that form planning a pricing plan.

      • Deploying a Pricing Plan

        Deploying a pricing plan involves compiling the pricing plan into a configuration file and loading the configuration file into the pricing database. During compilation, the pricing schema is validated and any errors that occur are displayed.

      • Group-Owned Pricing

        Groups can own product offers that define service pricing for group members. The product offers can define pricing for both usage and non-usage event types.

      • Taxation

        MATRIXX supports two types of taxation: tax classes and selectors, and US taxation. Tax classes specify tax rates or fixed taxes, and tax selectors dynamically select the tax rate, and apply one or more taxes to a charge. US taxation determines the taxes for a given location, and specifies the tax type, product category the tax applies to, and the tax authority who receives the tax based on CCH tax data.

    • Appendices
  • MATRIXX Pay Now
  • MATRIXX Subscriber Management
  • MATRIXX Subscriber Management API
  • MATRIXX Business API SDK
  • My MATRIXX Help
  • MATRIXX Backoffice Customer Tool Help
  • MATRIXX Third-Party Licenses
  • Glossary

Dynamic Balance and Meter Restrictions

The following restrictions apply to dynamic balances and meters.

A dynamic balance cannot have any of the following properties:
  • main balance
  • Aggregate
  • On-demand periodic balance
  • private balance
A dynamic meter cannot be any of the following:
  • An overdraft meter
  • A balance amount meter
  • An aggregate meter
  • A composite meter
  • A session meter
Related information
  • Dynamic Balance and Meter Restrictions
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