The Ticket Billing service module charges your clients for the amount of time you spend on their support tickets. You can bill either by the number of tickets opened or by time spent resolving them, called support tiers. Support ticket billing can be very versatile, depending on the way you configure it.

Tiered billing is most commonly escalating a ticket through different levels of expertise, and billing different rates for each. Support ticket billing can also be configured to account for time spent on each ticket, as well as per product, such as a light or regular version.

As tickets come in, your admin users set them to the appropriate tier. When your client’s support ticket service renews each month, each tier is figured separately for a grand total across them all.

Since time spent and tier level are based on the individual ticket, a client could have a month where the staff spent one hour and 20 minutes across a half dozen tier one tickets and five minutes spent on one tier two ticket.

In order to begin billing for this service, you need to configure Ubersmith. Once all the necessary pieces have been configured, any current or new service based on the service plan will be ready. The configuration steps are as follows:

1. Create a generic support ticket billing service plan.
2. Add the Ticket Billing service module to your service plan.
3. Configure the service module (below).
4. Create a support ticket billing service.
5. Configure the service plan with the service module fields (below).

Configuring the Service Module

1. In the Overage Precision field, select either 0, 1, or 2 to determine how many decimal places to round the amount of time spent.
2. In the Use template for Overage Notifications email field select Yes to enable the template fields.
3. In the Overage Notification From Address field, enter the email address the email is being sent from.

4. In the Overage Email Subject field, enter the subject of your overage email.

5. In the Overage Email Body field, enter the body of your overage email. Some example text is included in the field.

6. Click View Variables to display a list all the system variables available to customize your email.

7. Click Save or Save & New.
   

Service Module Fields in Service Plan

1. Access the client's Client Profile page.
2. On the Client Profile page, select Services and click List Services. 
   
   The Current Services page appears.
3. On the Current Services page, click Add Service. 
   
   The Add Service wizard appears.
4. In step 6 of the Add Service wizard, there is a Ticket Billing section which includes: 

• Billing Method: either Per-Ticket or Time Spent
• Unit: minutes or hours to bill in
• Included Billable: specify a support duration or a ticket count included in each month of service
• Overage Rate Billable: specify how much support over the Included Billable costs
• Notification Email Contact: specify who to inform about the monthly support usage

You can also add up to four separate tiers with their own included billable amount (Included Tier 2, etc) and overage rate billable (Overage Rate Tier 2, etc).

Whenever you receive a ticket from a client, update the 'billable' field on the view ticket page and specify the tier it falls into, or alternatively select Per Post to total the usage for that ticket based on a separate tier set for each individual post to the ticket. The Per Post billing method adds a support tier to each support comment or followup, which is then totaled by tier to provide the total post cost.

At the end of each billing period, Ubersmith automatically calculates support charges, and adds them to the renewal invoice along with a usage summary. You can view the details page for the support service item at any time to see a usage summary for the current and previous billing periods.

Related Topics 

Managing Service Plans

Support Manager

Support Manager Settings