Impacting Balances by Consumption Priority

Assign a consumption priority to an asset or currency balance template during pricing plan creation. Assigning a balance consumption priority to balance templates enables service providers to control which balances are charged first. The default balance consumption priority is 0.

During rating, when applying a charge or discount to a balance class containing usable balances from multiple balance templates, a balance from a template with a higher balance consumption priority will be selected before a balance from a template with a lower priority. For example, say you provide a data offer that grants 5 free MBs to a promotional assets balance and 10 charged-for MBs to a general assets balance, and you want subscribers to use the free assets first. When setting up the balance templates, you can assign a higher priority to the promotional assets balance template so that when data usage occurs, the free MBs are consumed first.

Balances have the same balance consumption priority if they come from the same balance template or if their templates have been assigned the same priority.

During rating, when applying a charge or discount to a balance class containing usable balances from multiple balance templates, if one or more balances have the same balance consumption priority, those balances are selected according to their expiration date and impacted in that order. The expiration date ordering starts with the balance that expires first and ends with the balance that expires last.

Using balance consumption priorities during rating is applicable to charges and discounts because these price components can identify a balance class to impact and that class might have several different balance templates, each with a different priority.

Using balance consumption priorities during rating is not applicable to grants because grant price components cannot identify a balance class to impact and instead must identify a specific balance template. With this restriction, balance consumption priority has no effect on grants because all candidate balances during rating are from the same template, and thus have the same priority. In this case, the balances are ordered according to their expiration date, starting with the balance with the latest expiration date and ending with the balance with the earliest expiration date.

Private balances can only be consumed in the context of the purchased item; outside this context the balance is not considered for impact. When a purchased item with a private balance is canceled, the private balance becomes unavailable for consumption.

Figure 1 shows how price components impact balance instances that have different balance consumption priorities. The charges and discounts impact the balance instances in order of balance consumption priority first, and then in order of balance expiration data (earliest to latest) next. The grants impact the balance instances in order of balance expiration date (latest to earliest) only.

For more information, see the discussion about balance selection during rating in MATRIXX Pricing and Rating.