Overview

CSP Classic Subscription also known as Microsoft Azure (0145P) subscription can be used to configure various billing settings, Partner Center discounts as well as generate user based invoices and customer invoice reports.

This topic describes the following features in detail:

CSP Cost Settings

HCP has various billing settings at partner center levels and individual customer levels. These setting are used for cost calculations of services under

• Cost and Usage

• Billing

• Billing report

Partner Center Discount

Partner center discount: Discount that Microsoft passes to CSP partner on the overall contract/agreement level.

• In HCP, partner center discount can be set under

  • Administration Tab > Account Management > Select Azure > Click on CSP.
    

• For all cost calculations for the CSP customer, this discount is added to the rate card of each item.

• The formula used by HCP for calculating the cost of an individual service is :

  • Partner Cost Calculation Formula =  RateCardCost*Usage/ 1-PartnerCenterDiscount%
    Example: If a service item cost as per usage is 100 Yen for a unit of consumption of 1, then the cost calculated for the service for 1 unit of consumption with 15% discount will be (100 Yen * 1 Unit) / (1-0.15) = 117.6470 Yen.

Billing Setting

HCP allows the setting of individual billing settings at a customer level.

• Individual customer billing settings can be configured on HCP under

  • Administration > CSP Management > Click on Customers > Select the Account ID from the dropdown.

  • Select the Customer > Click on Billing Settings tab and add a Markup Percentage > Click on Save.
    

• Markup: The Cloud Admin can set a markup percentage (%) on customer cost. This will add %s cost to all items over the Partner Center Cost for this particular customer subscription(s).
  Markup formula for cost calculation:
  Customer Markup Cost Calculation Formula = Rate Card Cost*Usage*1+marginmarkup%  1-Partner Center Discount %
  Example: If a service item’s cost per 1 unit of usage is 100 Yen, then cost for 1 unit usage with 10% margin markup will be following with 15% partner center discount: Actual Cost is 100 x 1 x 1+0.1  1-0.15 = 129.4117 Yen.

• In HCP, customer margins markups are stored in the DB with the time of records. At the time of cost calculation, the latest margin markup % is picked for the cost calculation.
  Say on June 10, the CA applied a 10% margin markup on the customer and then on August 10 it changed the margin markup to 5%. This has the following implication on the cost calculation for the customer:

  • Up to June 1 – All cost calculated up to June 1, will be without margin markup.

  • June 1 – July 31 – All items cost is calculated with a 10% margin markup.

  • August onward – All items cost is calculated with a 5% margin markup.

• Discounts: The Cloud Admin can set a discount percentage over the partner center cost. With the discount applied, all items cost will be calculated at the discounted rate over the partner center cost.
  Discount formula for cost calculation:
  Customer Discount Cost Calculation Formula = Rate Card Cost*Usage*1-Discount%  1-Partner Center Discount %
  Example: If a service item’s cost per 1 unit of usage is 100 Yen, then the cost for 1 unit usage with 10% discounted rate will be he following with a 15% partner discount: Discounted Cost is 100 x 1 x 1-0.1  1-0.15 = 105.8823 Yen.

• In HCP, discounts are stored in the DB with a time of records. At the time of cost calculation, latest discount valued is picked for the cost calculation.
  Say on June 10, the CA applied a 10% discount on the customer and then on August 10 it changed discount to 5%. This has the following implication on the cost calculation for the particular customer:

  • Up to June 1 – All cost calculated up to June 1, will be without discount.

  • June 1 – July 31 – All items cost is calculated at a discounted price of 10%.

  • August onward – All items cost is calculated at a discounted price of 5%.

• Tax rate: The Cloud Admin can additionally apply a custom tax rate for a particular customer by applying a uniform tax rate %.
  For all costs and usage cost calculations, HCP will start adding tax to the cost using the following price:

  • Customer with Margin Markup % applied and tax rate applied
    Customer Discount Markup Cost Calculation Formula =  Rate Card Cost *Usage*1 +MarginMarkup %  1-Partner Center Discount %x1+taxrate%

  • Customer with discount % applied and tax rate applied
    Customer Discount Cost Calculation Formula =  Rate Card Cost *Usage*1-Discount%  1-Partner Center Discount %x1+taxrate%

CSP Customer Billing & Invoices

On partner onboarding a new CSP partner, your HCP account will fetch all associated customers and the invoices from last six months, with all the invoice billing line items.
Once the partner is correctly setup on HCP, every 12 hours HCP fetches all the (new) invoices for the partner and show it under

• Administration > CSP Management > Billing.

• This can be manually triggered by running rediscovery under the Administration Tab > Account Management > Select Azure > Click on the Rediscovery button.
  

Types of billing invoices in Partner Center: (Ref: Billing Types)

• License-based and One-time billing: Invoices starting with characters G contains license and one-time billing items such as office 365 subscription, Azure Plan etc.

• Usage-based: These are recurring Azure usage-based subscriptions invoices. These invoices are identified with the initial character as D. In HCP, for all customer billing and reporting, we use D for billing invoices from the partner center.

Usage-based Invoice and customer invoice report generation

In HCP, the CA can see associated customer invoices and generate customer invoices against partner center invoices each month.

• Click on Administration > CSP Management > Billing to see all billing invoices.
  

• The CA can select a customer by clicking on a row to see various services' cost consumption by the customer. They can generate an invoice report for that particular customer.
  

Generating invoice report

• Cloud admin can generate a report for the customer by clicking on Administration > CSP Management > Billing > D-invoice > Customer > Clicking on Billing Report.

  • Clicking Add Report will generate a new invoice report for the customer.
    

• Generate PDF Report will take into consideration the Partner Center Discount, Customer Margins or Discount or any additional tax rate applied to the customer. The generated report will include Taxes.
  

• While generating a report, HCP takes the latest value of the partner center discount and customer billing settings. If the customer wants to re-adjust the customer billing setting for margins or discount or taxes, the CA can change the values under HCP:

  • Administration > CSP Management > Click on Customers > Select the Account ID from the dropdown.

• While generating an invoice report, HCP will always use the latest value of customer billing settings for that month. If the CA opens a backdated partner center invoice that says June invoice while in August, and generates a billing report, in that case it will pick up the latest value of the customer billing settings for the month of June. If no billing settings are found for June, then the latest settings (August month) will be applied.

CSP Customer spending and Dashboard

• To the list the spendings against each customer, navigate to HCP Administration > CSP Management > Click on Customers.

• This spending is picked from the last D (usage) invoice for the customer. At any moment, the spend value is picked for the last partner center D invoice value for that particular customer.
  
  In the above case, we have the latest D invoice on Aug 1. Customer spending as per the partner center invoice for customer ソフトバンク株式会社TU IT本部 商用環境 is ¥44,704,516.38.
  

• The same spending is plotted in the dashboard for each customer in the CSP Dashboard.
  

CSP Usage and Cost Collection Implementation

• HCP allows cost and usage collection for all CSP customer subscription for which monitoring is ON.
  
  Monitoring ON allow HCP to have real-time daily cost and usage collection of the subscription ID.

  • This can be seen under Governance and Security Tab > Click on Cost and Usage.

  • To collect service usage, HCP daily runs utilization collection jobs We can add job trigger time to get past 24 hours data for the subscriptions on which the monitoring is enabled.

  • HCP utilization job uses Azure utilization API that provides access to utilization records for a period that represents when the utilization was reported in the billing system.

• Daily Rate Card: HCP collects daily rate card information from Microsoft for each Azure SKU and stores in DB. This is used for daily usage cost collection.
  

• Daily usage collection: Each day, HCP Bima service creates a job that collects hourly usage data for past 24 hours from Azure for the particular subscription using partner center utilization API. The following diagram depicts how daily usage is collected for each day by HCP:

D0, D1, D2...are days.

• Hourly usage cost calculation: The hourly cost for each SKU is calculated based on its usage of consumption. This cost is the pre-tax cost. However, it does include the partner center discount, margin markup or discount for the subscription. The formula used for cost calculation is:
  Cost of Unit consumption =  Rate Card Cost*Usage*1+marginmarkup%  1-Partner Center Discount %

• Usage Data reconciliation: It is observed that for some services, utilization data takes more than 24 hours to reconcile. In daily usage collection jobs, this data gets missed and therefore affects the overall cost & usage cost calculation. To remediate this, HCP with the 6.5.2 patch 2, starts reconciling of records every 3^rd day by re-fetching all the records of past 3 days and then reconciles the usage. The following table depicts this flow:

This allows us to reconcile each day’s data by revisiting the utilization; thus capturing most of the records that were not immediately available with MS usage and the billing service API.