Table of Contents

Creating Discounts for Services and Packages

Mitchell Paul-Soumis Updated by Mitchell Paul-Soumis

Read Time: 5 mins

What is a discount in Sonar?

A discount in Sonar is any service or adjustment which provides a credit on the customer's account. In most cases, discounts can be further separated from your typical transactions into several additional categories:

  1. One-time discounts
  2. Recurring Discounts
  3. Expiring Discounts

One-Time Discounts

This type of discount allows you to provide a discount to a customer account as a one-time service, with a predictable cost. A one-time transaction is added to an account from the payments page, and is treated as a single purchase or payment. To create a new One-Time Discount, do as follows:

  1. Go to Settings → Billing → Services
  2. Click on the “Create One Time Service” button
  3. In the Billing Details section of new service creation, the “Application” must be set to credit, and the amount set to the desired credit amount for the customer to receive on a monthly basis
Examples of when you would use one-time discounts

One-time discounts are useful for single changes or promotions. For example, a one-time transaction could be used for referral discounts, where an existing customer has brought a new customer to your ISP through word of mouth. As a result, you give the referring customer a discount for each referral, as it occurs.

Recurring Discounts

This type of discount allows you to provide a discount to a customer account on a monthly, bi-monthly, or multi-month basis. These discounts are created and applied as a service on a customer account, and get applied at the same time as other services (debits or credits). The way to create a recurring discount is as follows:

  1. Go to Settings → Billing → Services
  2. Click on the Service creation drop down arrow and select “Create Recurring Service”
  3. In the Billing Details section of new service creation, the “Application” must be set to credit, and the amount set to the desired credit amount for the customer to receive on a monthly basis

Once created, the credit will appear in your list of available services, and can be selected and applied to customer accounts, which we'll look at in the next section.

Examples of when you would use recurring discounts

Recurring discounts are used as a means of providing a discount month-after-month, with no defined end point. For example, you might create a recurring discount for Tower Hosting, in which one of your existing internet subscribers is also hosting a network tower on their land. This customer would be receiving a set amount of money every month.

Expiring Discounts

This type of discount allows you to provide a credit service to the customer's account which will only remain on the account for a set amount of time. As a result of being added as a service, this discount will be calculated on the set bill day. The create an Expiring Service is as follows:

  1. Go to Settings -> Billing -> Services
  2. Click on the Service creation drop down arrow and select "Create Expiring Service"
  3. In the Billing Details section of new service creation, the "Application" must be set to credit, and the amount set to the desired credit amount for the customer to receive on a monthly basis
  4. Select the “Times to run”, which works with the Billing Frequency to determine how many billing cycles this Expiring Discount will be added to a customer's invoice.
Examples of when you would use Expiring Discounts

Expiring discounts allow you to create a credit service on the customer's account for a set duration. This type of discount is typically used to provide a promotional discount for new customers, such as $X off their invoice for 6 months. You could also use Expiring Discounts to slowly adjust customers to a new pricing model by stacking multiple dollar values of Expiring Discounts which all expire at different times.

How to apply discounts to customer accounts

Discounts can be applied to a customer account in various ways, however, the bottom line for most discount services is as follows:

Recurring and Expiring Discounts

For Recurring and Expiring Discounts, the discount is applied to the account as a service on the customer's account.

  1. Go to the Billing tab
  2. Click on the Services & Packages sub-tab
  3. Click on the Add Service button
  4. Select your recurring or expiring discount. In this example, we'll select Tower Hosting as a recurring discount:
  5. The Service will be displayed and when billing runs, the credit will automatically be applied to the invoice:

One-Time Discounts

For one-time discounts, they are applied as a transaction on the customer's account.

  1. Go to the Billing tab
  2. Navigate to the Transactions sub-tab
  3. Click on One-Time Transaction
  4. Select the One-Time Discount you want to apply
  5. The Transaction will be added to the list, and the Available Credits will be updated to reflect the discount amount.

Using Adjustments and One-Time Transactions versus Using Discount Services

One other method of applying discounts or credits to a customer's account is through the use of Adjustment services. Adjustment services allow you to apply a specifically created Adjustment service to the customer's account, which can be limited on a user-by-user basis. Meanwhile, One-Time Transactions allow you to take any current services and apply them as a single transaction on the customer's account.

Adjustments and One-Time Transactions are an effective way of managing a customer's bill total, but are primarily used as a reactionary discount, while the discount services we've highlighted are more proactive, and will apply the discounts during the course of the regular billing cycle.

You might use an Adjustment to provide a partial refund to a customer who was without service as a result of a network outage, while a one-time transaction could be used to manually add a referral or discount which was not added as a service.

How did we do?

Considerations When Using Avalara with Voice Services

Delinquency Billing Best Practices

Contact