How to Create Discount Programs¶
In this section
Use discounts to change the prices for services you provide to certain customers. Discounts can be applied only to regular services which are provided based on subscriptions. Discounts cannot be applied to suspensions, access and traffic services.
Hydra Billing supports common types of discounts: simple, for payments in certain amount, and bundle ones.
Discounts are set up in discount specifications. For each discount, you should specify the conditions a customer should meet (to subscribe to certain services, to make a payment in a specified amount), and the discount parameters (its amount and period).
As soon as the customer meets the conditions to be granted a discount, the system issues a discount certificate for him or her. Such documents are created only automatically and cannot be edited.
A discount certificate is closely linked to a subscription. The discount is granted for the certain subscription, so if the price plan is changed the certificate will not be used when issuing a charge log for a new subscription.
When issuing a charge log based on the subscription, Hydra Billing checks if there are discount certificates in force for this subscription. If such certificates are found, prices of the services change according to the discount parameters as per the discount specifications.
When a customer meets conditions to be granted several discounts, several discount certificates are created. Moreover, a customer can have any amount of certificates at once that can be applied to the same subscription. When a charge log is issued, the discount, which is most favorable for a customer, is applied.
Setting Up Discounts¶
First of all, you should create discount specifications. Determine the category of customers who can be granted discounts. With Hydra Billing, you can do it using customer tags and discount specification tags.
A customer can be granted a discount as per the created discount specification when he or she has all tags that are specified in For customers with tags in the discount specification. However, it is not enough: besides it, a customer needs to meet certain conditions to be granted a discount. Still, meeting the condition to have all tags as per the discount specification is obligatory.
If you plan to offer various discounts to different categories of customers, you should create a separate discount specification for each of the categories. Hydra Billing also allows creating several discount specifications with the same set of tags, so that the discounts as per these documents can be effective for one category of customers. We recommend creating separate specifications for different discount types, for example, you can differentiate bundle discounts and those for large payments.
The most important part of a discount specification is its contents. Each record in the contents is a separate discount.
Discounts can be of different types. Specify the type of the discount when creating it.
In order to get a simple discount a customer should only subscribe to the necessary service, so that the discount is granted right after creating the necessary subscription. Such discounts are easily granted, that is why they are usually used for promotional offers for services provided to some categories of customers. These services can be: television at a reduced price, special offers for students, discount offers for subscribers in a new locality, etc. For example, a discount specification containing such a discount, can be applied only to customers with middletown, promo tags.
You can also specify an additional condition for the payment amount. It can be either a fixed amount (for example, one month for free with the $400 prepayment) or an amount which covers a specified period (a 20 % discount for a 6-month prepayment). The customer is to make one payment in a substantial amount on an account which is charged for the service.
Hydra Billing also supports bundle discounts — it means, discounts are granted for subscriptions to several services at the same time (for example, free television with a broadband Internet). Services included in the bundle are to be paid for using the same customer account (but may be provided on the ground of different contracts).