Prepaid Balances

A prepaid balance is created when a subscriber purchases a credit in advance of service usage. All prepaid usage is tracked and authorized in real-time by the MATRIXX Charging Application.

Prepaid balances are often used for pay-as-you-go services, and can also be used for subscription services that credit subscribers with an allocated amount on a recurring or non-recurring basis. For example, subscribers can have a $50 charge authorized against their credit card at the beginning of each month to purchase a quantity of minutes and megabytes in advance. If they consume the monthly allotment before the next cycle charge, subscribers can choose to purchase more assets or wait until the balance is automatically refreshed at the beginning of the next monthly period.

As a subscriber uses a service, the associated charges are applied to the existing balance until the balance is entirely consumed and reaches a zero (0) amount. For example, a subscriber with a mobile phone service has a monthly grant of 500 minutes. At the start of each recurring period, the grant is added to a prepaid balance. If the subscriber uses 200 minutes, the prepaid balance is reduced to 300 minutes. This continues until the minutes balance is zero or a predefined credit limit, such as 10, is reached. The pricing associated with the service is used to determine what to do next. If the subscriber does not have any other balances to use, such as bonus minutes, a message is sent back to the network that the usage is not authorized. If other balances exist that can be used with this service, as with the bonus minutes, the MATRIXX Charging Application will continue rating the phone call, but will impact the next balance identified in the pricing configuration.

Note: By default, all prepaid balances have a hard credit limit of zero, so it is not necessary to set an additional credit limit on a prepaid balance. After the balance is consumed, usage is no longer authorized—unless pricing is set up to impact another balance.

A wallet can contain 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.

When you recharge a prepaid balance using the SubMan APIs, you can specify that the Charging Server request immediate payment using Pay Now. For more information about Pay Now, see MATRIXX Pay Now.