Postpaid Balances

A postpaid balance accumulates charges that are billed and settled at a future date or on a scheduled billing cycle. Postpaid balances are impacted in response to subscriber usage processed by the Charging Server, in either online or offline (batch) mode.

Postpaid balances are represented as positive values. As subscribers use services, the balance total increases as charges accumulate. Therefore, it is necessary to set a credit limit on a postpaid balance to limit subscriber usage. By default, the threshold set for postpaid balances is infinity.

Postpaid and prepaid balances can be used independently or together for the same subscriber to enforce specific pricing concepts or to create hybrid offerings. For example, pricing can be configured so multiple prepaid balances are consumed before the postpaid balance accrues. For instance, a data subscriber might have a prepaid balance of bonus megabytes they received in a promotion and a prepaid balance of monthly megabytes received from a subscription. When rating occurs, megabytes are subtracted from the bonus balance first. After the bonus megabytes are completely consumed, the megabytes are subtracted from the monthly balance. Charges start updating the postpaid balance only when the monthly balance is completely consumed.

A wallet can contain multiple actual currency postpaid balances, but only zero or one prepaid main balance and zero or one postpaid main balance. The postpaid main balance can be of the same class as the prepaid main balance. The post-paid main balance must be configured with a billing cycle, but it must be a simple (non-periodic) balance. SubMan API wallet query responses include the postpaid main balance amount for the prior period (LastBillingCycleAmount) in MtxBalanceInfoSimple. For more information about the SubMan APIs, see MATRIXX Subscriber Management API.

When defining a balance template in My MATRIXX, you can select to have external payment requests generated when purchase, recurring, and cancel charges are applied to postpaid, actual currency balances (simple or periodic only). When Create External Payment Request is selected on a balance template, external payment requests are generated when the following conditions are met:
  • The balance template is for a postpaid, actual-currency balance.
  • The balance template is not for a postpaid main balance.
For information about querying whether a balance is associated with an external payment method, see the pricing query APIs in MATRIXX Subscriber Management API.
Note: Refunds are not supported for balances with Create External Payment Request selected.

When making payments to a postpaid main balance, you can specify that the Charging Server request immediate payment using Pay Now.

Periodic Postpaid Balance Example

Consider the following example:
  • Billing cycle — Monthly
  • Event time — 2017-09-30T23:10:00
  • Authorization request — 100 minutes
  • Usage charge — 0.04 per minute

If the credit limit is 100.0 and the balance amount is 90.0, then the authorized amount is 100 minutes and the reservation amount for the current period is 4.0. However, if the credit limit is 100.0 and the balance amount is 97.0, then the authorized amount is 75 minutes and the reservation amount for the current period is 3.0. Only after 2017-10-01T00:00:00 (the beginning of the next month) can another 25 minutes be authorized.