Creating, Managing, and Reviewing Products

You can create Products in m3ter to represent the products and services you offer to your end customers. You can then create and configure the required Product entities in you m3ter Organization to bill end-customers for Product consumption:

• To enable usage-based pricing for a Product:
  • Create Meters and Aggregations to collect Product usage data and define pricing metrics for Product consumption.
  • Set up Product Plans and apply usage-based pricing to Plans using the metrics you’ve defined, and then attach priced Plans to Accounts that consume the Product.
• To enable unit-based subscription charge pricing for a Product:
  • Create Counters to represent the Product units you want to charge by - such as seats or licenses - and use these Counters to apply unit-based pricing to Product Plans.
  • Attach the priced Plans to Accounts that consume the Product and then Create Counter adjustments against Accounts for the number of units the Account has subscribed to.

This topic explains how to create Products for your Organization, review Product entities, create Product entities, and how to check a Product’s metadata:

• Creating Products
• Reviewing Product Entities
• Creating Product Entities
• Reviewing Product Metadata
• Custom Fields

Creating Products

To create a Product:

1. In the Console, select Products. The Products page opens and lists any existing Products in your Organization.
2. Select Create product. The Create page opens:
3. On the Create page enter the details of your new Product:

• Name. Enter a descriptive name.
• Code. Unique identifier for the Product.
  • Note that when you enter a name and click in the Code field, a default code is entered based on the name you’ve entered, which you can then edit as required.

Tip: Required Attributes? Both attributes are required and are marked with a red asterisk.

4. Select Create product:

The Product details page opens:

5. If you want to edit a Product’s details, select the Edit button, make your changes, and click Update.
6. If you want to remove a Product, select Delete:

• Alternatively, return to the Products page and select the Delete button for the Product:

A confirmation popup opens.

7. Select Yes to confirm the delete action.

Important: Product has child entities! If you attempt to delete a Product and child entities exists that belong to the Product - such as Plan Templates or Meters - then you will not be able to and an error message will show.

Reviewing Product Entities

On the Product details page, you can review and check various types of entities created for a Product and which belong to it.

To review Product entities:

1. In the Console, select Products. The Products page opens.
2. Search for the Product you want to review and select the Name hotlink text to open the Product. The Product details page opens.
3. Scroll down the page and entities belonging to a Product are listed under tabs:

• Meters
• Aggregations
• Compound Aggregations
• Counters
• Plan Templates
• Plans

When you first open the Product details page, the Meters tab is selected by default.

4. Select a tab to review the entities of that type that belong to the Product:

• In this example, two Plans belonging to the Product are listed.
• Note that if you select the Meters, Aggregations, Compound aggregations, or Counters tab, then GLOBAL versions of these entities created for your Organization are also listed because these can be applied to any Product, such as using a global Counter to price a Product Plan:

Tip: Tab selection persists! If you select a Product entity tab and navigate away from the Product details page, when you return the tab selection is preserved for your current login session.

5. You can manage entities belonging to a Product:

• Select the Name hotlink text to open the details page for an entity.
• Edit an entity:

• Delete an entity:

Creating Product Entities

You can create entities for a Product directly from the Product details page.

This section shows how to create a Product Plan as an example. To create other entity types for a Product, you can follow similar steps.

To create Product entities:

1. In the Console, select Products. The Products page opens.
2. Search for the Product you want to create an entity for and select the Name hotlink text to open the Product. The Product details page opens.
3. Scroll down the page and select the tab for the entity type you want to create for the Product - for the current example Plans:

4. Select Create plan. The Create page opens with the Product pre-selected.
5. Select or enter the other required Plan details:

• Plan Template
• Name
• Code

6. Configure the other Plan attributes as required:

• Standing charge
• Minimum spend
• Custom fields

7. Select Create plan. You are returned to the Product details page and the new Product entity is shown on the Plans tab:

Reviewing Product Metadata

If you scroll down the Product details page, you can review Product metadata:

Custom fields. Any Custom fields created for the Product entity are listed:

• You can Copy the String or Number value of a Custom Field to your clipboard. See below Custom Fields.

External mappings. Any existing mappings created for the Product are listed:

• The External system and External table mapped to are shown - such as Stripe - Product in the above example. The External entity ID mapped to is also shown.
• If a listed External mapping is linked to an Integration, under Linked integration a hotlink text will be shown which you can use to open the Integration.
• Under Actions, you can edit or delete the External mapping.
• If the Product has multiple External mappings created for it, you can use Search external mappings to search by External table and External entity ID and filter the list.
• You can commence a workflow to Create external mapping for the Product directly - see Creating and Managing External Mappings for Accounts for an example.

Integration runs. If you’ve set up an integration that synchronizes the Product with an external system, the date/time and status of the Latest integration run are shown. You can use a text hotlink to open details of this latest run or View all runs. See Reviewing Integration Run Details.

Custom Fields

You can define Custom Fields when creating a Product or edit the Product at a later date to do this. Any Custom Fields you create for an individual Product override those you’ve created for Products at the Organizational level. We strongly recommend reviewing Working with Custom Fields before you create Custom Fields.