The Product Catalog is used to describe your products and services. It has a hierarchical structure - Plans are built from combinations of Products.
- Products define “what” is sold.
- Plans bundle together products and define “How”, "How Much”, and "How Often".
- Customers subscribe to Plans (which may contain underlying Products).
Products and Plans define how to charge (one-time, usage-based, or recurring) and provide default pricing - i.e., they act as a template for setting pricing. As they are assigned to a particular customer you have the opportunity to override the pricing to create customer-specific pricing. (In the same way, all of the text fields can be modified to control the appearance of the invoice.)
Plans have prices of their own, as well as any pricing specified with the included products. A single plan can include pricing for different payment schedules (monthly, quarterly, annual) so you don’t need to create a new plan for each variation.
What Types of Product Should I Create?
Every Plan needs to contain at least one Product. The most simple example would be a single Product called "Recurring Fee" which sets the amount that the customer will be billed each month (or year). You would create one Product and include it in a single Plan. That's it!
However, the power of Fusebill is that you can build up many different types of Products - some of them with pricing, some of them without - and then combine them into virtually endless varieties of Plans to suit your customers' needs. As mentioned above, each Plan can also have multiple frequencies, so that you don't need to replicate that Plan multiple times in your Catalog in order to support, for example, monthly and yearly customers.
Fusebill supports three different kinds of Product:
- Recurring Service
- One-Time Fee
- Physical Good
For more information on these Products, see Creating Products.
Individual Customer Pricing
When a customer subscribes a plan, customer-specific pricing can be set. This means that there is no need to create products or plans just to support a single client.