New commerce experience in Cloud Solution Providers program (CSP) Azure plan billing
Appropriate roles: Admin agent | Billing admin
This article shows you how to access and understand your invoice and reconciliation data for Azure plan billing. Azure plan billing is easy, with one billing date and calendar-monthly billing period.
Access your invoices and reconciliation files
The billing admin for your company receives an email when the invoice is ready.
To access the new commerce invoices and reconciliation files, follow these steps:
Sign in to Partner Center and select the Billing workspace.
Go to the Billing overview (NCE) task menu > Billing | Billing Overview (NCE) page and choose the year > select the invoice number > find the reconciliation file on the side panel > select Download report.
About usage data
Azure plan the highest-level container for usage. All usage is linked to an Azure plan.
An Azure plan contains one or more Azure subscriptions. You use subscriptions to manage and deploy resources.
Resource groups are a way to organize resources in a subscription. Every resource belongs to one resource group.
Examples of resources are like virtual machines and storage accounts.
Meters measure how much of a resource you use. A resource can have different meters for different usage aspects. Each meter has a unique Meter ID.
Hierarchy of subscription resource groups and metering
Azure plan:
Subscription A
ResourceGroup 1
- Virtual machine (resource)
- Compute meter
- Virtual network (resource)
- No billing meter
- Virtual machine (resource)
ResourceGroup 2
- Virtual machine (resource)
- Compute meter
- Premium SSD-managed disk (resource)
- Storage capacity meter
- Storage operations meter
- Virtual machine (resource)
Subscription B
ResourceGroup 1
- Azure SQL (resource)
- Compute meter
- VPN Gateway (resource)
- VPN gateway meter
- Azure SQL (resource)
ResourceGroup 2
- Virtual Network Interface (resource)
- No billing meter
- Virtual Network Interface (resource)
About your invoice
See the following numbers in the image.
Invoice is available by the eighth of each month.
Partners have 60 days to make payment.
The billing period is a full calendar month, for example June 1 to 30.
Charges are net of adjustments (such as "partner earned credit").
Review the invoice reconciliation file and daily rated usage file for more billing details.
Invoice reconciliation
The invoice reconciliation line items show discounts or credits for each meter in the billing period. For example, a meter might have a tiered discount, or a partner earned credit (PEC). The
PriceAdjustmentDescription
describes the discount and theEffectiveUnitPrice
shows the price after adjusting discounts.The effective unit price for a resource equals the unit price without discounts or partner earned credits when the pricing and billing currency is the same.
How to find tiered pricing in the reconciliation line items
Find out how to match tier prices in your invoice reconciliation data.
Read the daily usage file
Azure plan meters every day calculates the subscription charges.
Partner earned credit applies to the eligible resources or subscriptions daily.
Subscription meter show line item for each day's usage if there's any usage in that month.
In the following image:
Meter qualified for Partner earned credit for services managed from 7/1 - 7/3 (Note the effective unit price is the retail price less partner earned credit.
Meter didn't qualify for Partner earned credit for services managed from 7/4 - 7/7 (Note the effective unit price is the retail price).
Meter qualified for Partner earned credit for services managed from 7/8 - 7/31 (Note the effective unit price is the retail price less partner earned credit).
Azure reservations
You can buy Azure reservations under an Azure plan and pay once or monthly.
Azure savings plans
You can buy Azure savings plans under an Azure plan and pay once or monthly. Learn how to reconcile Azure savings plans.
How do you calculate the costs of a product that has both a fixed fee and pay-as-you-go charges?
To learn how we calculate costs for a product or subscription with both fixed and variable charges, see cost calculation.
What unit price do we use to calculate the cost of Azure reservations or savings plans?
You pay for Azure reservations or savings plans in your billing currency. We convert the USD price to your billing currency with the exchange rate of the billing month. The reconciliation line item shows the exchange rate.
Effective unit price calculation for Azure plan pay-as-you-go
The effective unit price is adjusted at the meter level (as opposed to the resource level) based on your usage. We use these factors to calculate the effective unit price:
- Daily usage throughout the billing period
- Billable cost for the meter
- Tier pricing (if applicable)
- Partner earned credit (if applicable)
The effective unit price changes based on your daily usage and is finalized at the end of the billing period.
Find out whether your meter uses tiered pricing
If you don't know whether your meter uses tiered pricing, follow the steps to find out.
Sign in to Partner Center and select the Pricing workspace.
Select Azure plan pricing.
Find your meter by ID, and then download the pricing data.
Sample calculation
Here’s how to find the effective unit price in the open billing period.
The table uses these values:
UP = Unit price of the resource/hour = 0.868
BUU = Billable usage unit for the meter
BC = Billable cost for the meter = BUU * UP * 0.85, which accounts for the 15% PEC. To charge the minimum amount, we round the value down to two decimal places.
Effective unit price = BUU/BC
Note
The meter in this example doesn't have any tier pricing or discounts.
Date | BUU (Billable usage unit) | BC (Billable cost) | Effective unit price |
---|---|---|---|
3-Aug | 29 | 21.39 | 0.737586206896552 |
10-Aug | 210.950039 | 155.63 | 0.737757626107858 |
25-Aug | 555.950039 | 410.17 | 0.737782122900436 |