Overview

You will receive an invoice from Axcient that charges you, the partner, based on the amount of online backup storage, local-only backup devices, and email archiving mailboxes you have. (The exact price is listed in your partner contract.) In addition to your invoice from Axcient, monthly billing reports are available to you in the partner web portal (login, go to Reports -> Billing Reports). These reports will help you (a) understand your invoice in more detail, and (b) bill your end-user customers. Invoices are sent to partners monthly, and cover the service charges for the previous month.

Instead of manually creating your customer invoices based on the Axcient invoice, we highly recommend that you instead use the Billing Reports in the partner web portal. Reports can be downloaded for any prior month during which you were a partner. Different report types are available, including an invoice detail report (suitable for printing and manual data entry) and raw data reports (suitable for automating billing). This document describes how to use the raw customer data reports to bill your customers.

Instructions

1. In the web portal, go to the Reports menu and choose Billing Reports.
2. Choose Raw Customer Data Report for the report type, and choose the end of last month for the period.
3. Click the Download Report button.

Once you have downloaded the .xls file, you can open it in Microsoft Excel (or another spreadsheet program). There will be one row in the spreadsheet for each parent account. Note that sub-accounts are not included in the list, as the software has already summed the disk usage (and other resources) of the sub-accounts into the disk usage of the parent account.

First, you need to decide whether or not you will be billing your customers for compressed or uncompressed data. There are three options:

1. Bill all of your customers for uncompressed data.
2. Bill all of your customers for compressed data.
3. Bill some of your customers for compressed data and others for uncompressed data.

Almost all partners will want to bill their customers based on uncompressed amounts, as this is typically also how Axcient will bill the partner. Billing for uncompressed amounts is advisable in most cases because the uncompressed amount is much more predictable than the compressed amount, so estimating costs and generating accurate quotes for end-users is much simpler.

Common Instructions

For each row use the data in the columns to create an invoice for the appropriate customer. Some resellers are able to use their accounting software to associate a value in the AccountNo column (or possibly the InternalDescription column) with a customer in their accounting system, and create a new invoice for that customer.

How much you should invoice each customer for depends on how much online backup disk space they are using, how many local-only backup devices they have, and how many billable email archiving mailboxes they have. The following is a description of the fields most relevant to billing:

• IsDel: 0 or 1. 1 if the account is deleted.
• IsExpired: 0 or 1. 1 if the trial account has expired.
• CanViewCompressed: 0 or 1. This is set when the partner sets the service plan for an accounts (the 'Allow user to view compressed disk usage' field). Depending on which strategy you choose, you may or may not need to use this column.
• UncompressedDiskGB: Number of uncompressed GB used by remote backups.
• CompressedDiskGB: Number of compressed GB used by remote backups.
• BillableDiskGB: Will equal UncompressedDiskGB if CanViewCompressed is 0 or will be CompressedDiskGB otherwise.
• LocalBackupIsBillable: 0 or 1. Only 1 if this account (or customer for the raw customer data report) is treated by Axcient as being billable for local backup services.
• LocalBillableNumServers: The number of server devices billable by Axcient for local backup services.
• LocalBillableNumNonServers: The number of non-server devices billable by Axcient for local backup services.
• LocalNumServers: The total number of server devices performing local backups (not all of them may be billable by Axcient, because of the free local backups earned from online backups).
• LocalNumNonServers: The total number of non-server devices performing local backups.
• LocalUncompressedDiskGB: Number of uncompressed GB used by local backups.
• LocalCompressedDiskGB: Number of compressed GB used by local backups.
• LocalBillableDiskGB: Will equal LocalUncompressedDiskGB if CanViewCompressed is 0 or will be LocalCompressedDiskGB otherwise.
• ProvisionedMailboxes: The number of mailboxes the partner has provisioned for email archiving for this account.
• BillableMailboxes: The number of mailboxes for email archiving billable by Axcient. ProvisionedMailboxes only become billable when the archiving software has been installed onto a server.

Note that in the "Raw Account Data" report, all of the above fields do *not* include amounts for sub-accounts. There are similar fields that end with "WithSub" that for parent accounts also include the amounts of that parent account's sub accounts. When generating end-user invoices typically you want to use the "Raw Customer Data" report, in which case the above fields do include all resources used by the sub-accounts.

Also note that in the "Raw Account Data" report, deleted sub-accounts will still appear, but any billable resources will be zero'd out for the deleted sub-accounts, so that they do not affect billable resources if you total the data for all accounts belonging to a particular parent account.

When billing for online backup disk usage, which column you should use to determine how much disk space the account is using depends on whether you are billing for compressed data or not. Each strategy is described below.

Billing All Customers for Uncompressed Data

In this case, you can ignore the CanViewCompressed field, and you should use the UncompressedDiskGB and LocalUncompressedDiskGB columns.

Billing All Customers for Compressed Data

In this case, you can ignore the CanViewCompressed field, and you should use the CompressedDiskGB and LocalCompressedDiskGB columns.

Also note that Axcient will currently always bill the partner for uncompressed amounts for Basic accounts. Thus, if you have any Basic accounts, you should always generate invoices based on the fields with the uncompressed amounts.

Billing Some Customers for Compressed and Others for Uncompressed

First, when creating accounts and changing the Service Plan for accounts, you should be sure to correctly check or uncheck the "Allow user to view compressed disk usage" checkbox. If you have properly set this field for your accounts, then you can properly use the BillableDiskGB and LocalBillableDiskGB when generating your end-user invoices.

Conclusion

Axcient provides both detailed and summarized billing data to help you understand your invoice and help you generate your own end-user invoices. Additionally, the raw data reports should be suitable for automating the generation of end-user invoices. The column order in these reports are stable and won't change in the future (we will only append new fields), so your scripts can depend on them.

If you have remaining questions about any of these reports or the billing process, please open a ticket.