How To: Setup billing

This article explains how to setup and use billing profiles in Gizmo.

Before proceeding, we suggest you understand the different ways you can add time to customers

Billing profiles can be used to charge customers a different hourly rate based on:

• The customer's usergroup
• Custom time zones or week days
• The specific host they use

To properly configure Gizmo, first establish the billing strategy you are going to use. Ask yourself the following:

• How will i group and charge my customers?
• Do i require just 2 groups, visitors and regular members?
• Do i plan to have and charge VIP members differently?
• Do i have different computers that i want to charge a different hourly rate for?
• Will the price change based on the time of day or on weekends?

• As soon as you have decided your strategy, start by creating your Usergroups

If you plan on charging guests differently than members, create an extra user group just for guests and select - used for: "Guests only". If you want to charge same as a member usergroup, create only one usergroup for both and select - used for: "Members & Guests".

• Next, create a billing profile for each usergroup.

If you decide to charge specific hosts a different hourly rate, setup this billing profile based on the price of 1 of the host groups, usually the one with the most hosts (e.g. pc). For the other host groups (e.g. consoles) we will create extra billing profiles later.

To change the rate for a different period of day, go to custom rates, and add a rate for the period of time. Any time not covered by custom rate uses the main rate.

• Back to usergroups, select each billing profile in the correct usergroup

When you are finished, each usergroup will have a Billing profile attached to it.

For now, this billing profile will be used for all hosts, be it a PC, a table or a console.

It is ok for 2 usergroups to use the same billing profile. Just remember that, if you modify it in the future, it will affect all usergroups that use it.

Now that we have successfully configured a default billing profile for each of our usergroups, we will need to group our computers and endpoints into Host groups

• Create a host group for each bundle of hosts that will have a different hourly rate. For example, you can create one group for consoles and another for vip computers.

• Select the guest group that will be used for each host. If you do not wish to use guests for this host group, leave it empty.

• Go to hosts, and assign a host group to each host. Make sure all hosts belong to a host group.

Now that we have grouped our hosts to different groups, we will create extra billing profiles for those groups that charge a different hourly rate than the usergroup's default.

• Go back to billing profiles and create the extra rates
• Open host groups and select the extra profiles on the second tab. This selection overrides the billing profile of the user using the host. Empty simply means that the usergroup's default will be used

Done! you have successfully:

1. Grouped your customers into usergroups
2. Configured a base billing profile for each usergroup
3. Grouped your hosts into different hostgroups
4. Configured an override billing profile for some of your usergroups