Usage – Provider Portal

Updated: October 14, 2020

Contents

Reviewing Reports from Vendors

When the vendor submits the usage report and transitions it to the status Pending, the provider can access and download the spreadsheet for validation.

The file available for provider download contains more information than the one provided by the vendor to help the provider validate the file. The provider will have access to the following additional columns:

Column Header	Description
item_name	The display name of the item as provided by vendor on the product definition, for example “Gold seat”
item_type	in this column we can see if an item is PPU (pay-per-use) or reservation
item_unit	exposes the unit of measure of the item, for example “licenses”
item_period	exposes the billing period for the item, it can be one time, monthly or yearly billing. Please see that this is not commitment time but rather exposes how often vendor bills for this item to the provider
asset_id	unique identifier of the asset on Connect platform
asset_external_id	identifier of the asset on the commerce system, this value shall be easily identified by a provider
customer_account_id	customer account identifier on the commerce system
customer_company_name	customer account name as defined on last request sent by commerce system

Following the review, provider can accept it or reject the report:

In case of rejection, providers provide a reason that can be seen by vendors for further processing.
In case of acceptance, the report becomes available for propagation to the Provider systems.

Acceptance Automation

Providers have 3 ways of accepting reports from Vendors:

Manually using Provider Portal
Using API by creating some Custom Script
Using Automation Rules of the Provider Portal

The latter options allows Providers to specify simple processing rules that will automatically accept or reject Usage Report from the Vendor:

Usage Rules can be configured at the Product Details > Usage Rules page of the Provider Portal.

Extracting Data

Once a usage report has been accepted, providers can extract usage data to their systems per hub:

For systems that are integrated with CloudBlue Connect in an automated way, records are automatically extracted using either record-level API calls or bulk file export.

Reconciling Data

Once usage data has been used for billing, corresponding records need to be marked as “Closed” in the Usage Report file for the end-to-end reconciliation. This could be achieved either through API or by uploading reconciliation report manually in the Provider Portal:

Reconciliation file structure is similar to the extraction file with 2 additional columns:

external_billing_id – any string value that would allow to reference relevant billing object (invoice, order, etc.)
external_billing_note – any additional data that might be useful for the reconciliation

Once Reconciliation file is uploaded and processed, statistics of the Closed records will be updated to reflect how many records were closed: