Services Description (February 2023)
Last updated February 20, 2023
This document describes the features and capabilities generally available in the product modules included in the applicable product tier of m3ter Services provided to Customers. m3ter provides the features and capabilities as set out below or as otherwise set out in the applicable Order Form if those take precedence. Where the applicable Order Form refers to legacy product tier names and descriptions, the entitlement set out it our referred to in that Order Form takes precedence until further notice and may be subject to change upon renewal.
Use of the m3ter Services as described above is subject to the Terms of Service and our Privacy Notice. The m3ter Services Description is deemed to form part of the Documentation (found at https://www.m3ter.com/docs, as construed in accordance with the Terms of Service) and may be updated by m3ter from time to time.
m3ter Core Product Module
Service Setup and Administration
| Feature | Description | SMB | Enterprise |
|---|
| Organization setup | Flexibly configure Organizations in m3ter:
- Manage Users and assign permissions.
- Create Service Users for API access.
- Define End-Customer Accounts and manage the Products they will consume.
Grant m3ter Support time-bound access to your Organization to allow them to assist with support requests. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Organization Configuration | - Configure Organization-wide settings for Billing, including currency, auto-approval interval, scheduling frequency, bill due date, and external invoice date.
- Set up required currencies, including creation of custom currencies and credits or tokens.
- Add Credit Reasons for creating credit line items for bill adjustments.
- Create Transaction Types for adding transactions to Account Balances.
- Define Custom Fields to store string or number values as custom data against main configuration entities.
- Reference stored custom values in Derived Field and Compound Aggregation calculations.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Console | - Fully featured UI offering intuitive workflows to configure and manage your m3ter implementation.
- Direct links to User and API Reference documentation.
- Access Support Helpdesk portal for web ticketing and knowledge base.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Customer Platforms | - Automatically send usage and cost data to m3ter directly from your own & 3rd party platforms.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Billing Systems | - Automatically send the output of bill computations to your invoicing system so that invoice calculations are correct and contain the required calculation breakdowns.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| CRM & CPQ Systems | - Synchronize end-customer account information in your CRM & CPQ with m3ter. It also optionally allows you to sync pricing between the two systems.
| ✔ | ✔ |
m3ter Integrations
| Feature | Description | SMB | Enterprise |
|---|
| Custom Integrations | - Create bespoke integrations with third party systems using the m3ter OpenAPI framework. Enables both inbound and outbound synchronization of data flows.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Webhooks | - Use Webhooks to establish and maintain data synchronization and flow between m3ter and third party systems.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Native Integrations | - Productised m3ter integrations offering self-serve to configure and fully implement integrations with your 3rd-party systems directly in the m3ter Console.
- Includes ability to define authorization method/credentials for connection with external systems and define mappings of data fields for precise data transfer synchronization.
| ✔ | ✔ |
m3ter Metering, Rating & Billing Engine
| Feature | Description | SMB | Enterprise |
|---|
| Cost Metering | - Flexibly define your cost schema using a combination of Products, Meters and Aggregations. Includes the ability to deliver your cost data using the Ingest API.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Usage Data - Metering | - Flexibly define Meters and Aggregations to set up usage data collection and measurement schema.
- Define Global Meters / Aggregations to collect usage data for charging across multiple Products.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Usage Data - Rating | - Use Derived Field calculations on Meters and Compound Aggregations to greatly extend the range of unit measurements of usage data available for product pricing.
- Use Segmented Aggregations to apply differentiated pricing to usage data, and implement variable costing for usage across multiple data dimensions.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Data Ingest | - Set up data ingest to the service by exploiting a robust Ingest API designed for high availability and high request rate capacity.
- Alternatively, obtain a URL and use a file upload call to ingest your usage data.
- Ingested data are automatically cleaned, transformed, and standardized.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Pricing Configuration | - Precisely define rating/costing for your Product pricing Plans based on aggregated units of usage data.
- Use Pricing Editor wizards to facilitate product plan pricing for common usage-based pricing models.
- Apply negative pricing per unit cost for your product plans to credit Accounts for unused usage allocation.
- Review historic/future pricing for Plans directly in the Pricing Editor.
- Create Plan Groups to apply minimum spends across multiple products which are each priced separately.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Compound Aggregations | - Derive numerical usage measures to meet complex pricing use cases. Bundle simple Aggregations by addition or apply calculations to one or more simple Aggregations.
- Reference other field values in calculations to achieve precise measures needed for pricing and billing requirements, including custom and bill period variable fields.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Segmented Aggregations | - Segment usage data collected by Meters, enabling different pricing for segments. Includes support for both default values and wildcards for pricing.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Calculation Engine | - Exploit powerful Calculation Engine for Derived Field, Compound Aggregation, and Notification rule calculations. Supports standard syntax, arithmetic and logical operators, variables, functions, and type-casting.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Bill Calculation | - Attach Product pricing Plans to End-Customer Accounts for billing against the usage an Account consumes. Includes ability to define Prepayment/Commitment agreements on Accounts, and set up user-defined custom billing schedules for Commitment fees.
- Create Contracts for Accounts consuming Product packages to report total Contract value to accounting systems. Set up standing charges and minimum spend amounts on Accounts.
- When Accounts set up as Parent/Child Accounts, use billing modes feature to control how charges across the linked Accounts are compiled for Billing.
- Use a Run billing modal to run billing manually for all billing frequencies or a specific billing frequency.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Bill Management and Approval | - Define billing period and frequency, auto-approval period, and scheduling intervals for Bill re-calculation. Control first bill dates, bill due dates, and external invoice dates.
- Control locking of Bills and review billing history per Account. Approve Bills by selection or approves all Bills up to selected date.
- Set up integrations with 3rd-party systems for calculating and sending Bills outbound to external invoicing. Define credit reasons and use to add credit line items manually for Bill adjustments.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Balances and Credits | - Support for end-user Account balances and product/global credits that can be drawn-down against usage charges.
- Handling of negative or positive amounts to credit end-user customers, or refund them for unused services.
- Top-up balances for an account as many times as required.
- Add Balances on Accounts as wallet amount for draw-down against usage.
- Apply time-bound Balances with the option of a grace period.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Alerts | - Receive system alerts for your Organization in the Console UI. Alerts flagged at different severity levels and in multiple areas of functionality.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Events and Notifications | - Events service with real-time processing of system events for creation, updating, and deletion of core configuration entities - such as Meters or Prepayments/Commitments - and billing entities, such as Balances or Bills.
- Exploit Calculation Engine to apply logic and calculations to create notification rules that sharply define the conditions for triggering notifications on the basis of events.
- Ability to send event notifications to third party systems via webhooks.
| ✔ | ✔ |
Data Explorer
| Feature | Description | SMB | Enterprise |
|---|
| Usage Data | - Query & browse usage data collected by Meters in bulk and aggregate. Filter query results by Account Meter fields. Review returned data sets in Data Table or Pivot Table formats. Includes the ability to export usage data and to save and re-use previously built Queries.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Billing Data | - Query & browse billing data by Account over time and aggregate in a number of ways, including reviewing Bill running totals at any point in time. Filter query results by Account, Bill line item type, or Product. Review returned data sets in Data Table or Pivot Table formats. Toggle Data Table dimensions on/off for preferred layout. Includes the ability to export billing data and to save and re-use previously built Queries or load standard Queries.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| Prepayments | - Query for End-Customer Account Prepayments/Commitments and any remaining obligations associated with them. Review returned data sets in Summary or Data Table formats. Check for any remaining obligations under the prepayment on the Account queried. Review Bills raised against the queried Account for prepayment fees. Includes the ability to export prepayments data and to save and re-use previously built Queries.
| ✔ | ✔ |
m3ter Features & Capabilities Applicable to all Product Modules
m3ter APIs
| Feature | Description | SMB | Enterprise |
|---|
| Config and Ingest APIs | - Configure and interact with the m3ter Service using our APIs: Config API for configuration and management.
- Ingest API for submitting raw measurement data.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| API Error Messaging | - Informative Error Message responses returned for invalid and disallowed calls under standard HTTP error codes.
| ✔ | ✔ |
| API Collections for Postman | - Download and import m3ter sample API and OpenAPI Collections into your Postman Workspace.
| ✔ | ✔ |
m3ter Support
| Feature | Description | SMB | Enterprise |
|---|
| Web Ticketing | Submit and track Support tickets in m3ter Helpdesk portal. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Knowledge Base | Access Knowledge Base via Helpdesk portal to review troubleshooting guidance, FAQs & Tips, and How To articles on common product tasks and configuration procedures. | ✔ | ✔ |
| API Documentation | Access full API Reference documentation covering Config and Ingest API calls, including examples of valid request and response schemas. | ✔ | ✔ |
Data Retention
| Feature | Description | SMB | Enterprise |
|---|
| End-Customer configuration data* | Amount of time we store End-Customer configuration data, including accounts, plans etc. | Customer managed* | Customer managed* |
| End-Customer calculated data* | Amount of time we store End-Customer calculated data such as bills and spend reports. | Customer managed* | Customer managed* |
| Ingested Usage and Cost Measurements* | Storage & retention of unaggregated ingested Measurements in a cleaned and transformed common format (suitable for performing technical audit, reconciliation, and recalculation functions). | At least 3 Months from creation* | At least 3 Months from creation* |
| End-Customer Aggregated Measurements* | Storage & retention of aggregated Measurements suitable for performing billing functions. | At least 12 Months from creation* | At least 12 Months from creation* |
DISCLAIMER & RECOMMENDATION: m3ter does not store raw Measurements sent to the m3ter Service by Customers in an accessible location or format. m3ter’s temporary storage of any raw Measurements sent is for use by internally operated compliance, resilience and disaster recovery processes only, and subject to our standard Data retention and deletion policy as set out in the m3ter Terms of Service from time to time.
It is strongly recommended that Customers additionally store and back-up any raw Measurements sent to the m3ter Service using their preferred storage solution and provider to meet their own operational or compliance requirements as the case may be.
*For the purposes of clarity, this refers to the specification of the product features relating to End-Customer and ingested Measurement data storage and retention within your contract period, and does not conflict with the Data retention policy as set out in the m3ter Terms of Service from time to time.
