You can use service contracts with items that are usage-based to bill your customers for services with a certain usage volume (of copies, for example) after you have agreed on a service contract. This allows you as the service provider to react more flexibly to customer demands while reducing costs for the end customer.

You can model the entire process of usage-based service contract management in SAP CRM, from creating a service quotation and contract, entering and calculating the usage volume using counters and readings, right through to billing.

In the service contract, you specify the quantities to be used and define corresponding conditions.

You can specify credits, or quantities that are included with the service flat rate.

You can link various contracts together with a pool contract for pricing and billing purposes in usage-based billing. You can use pool contracts to periodically recalculate the usage of all assigned contracts (single pool contracts) or run consumption billing for all assigned contracts in the pool contract (aggregate contract).

Volume determination can occur in many different ways. For more information, see Usage Determination.

Usage-based billing occurs on a periodic basis. You can bill the service contract separately from usage-based billing.

For example, if customers pay the contractual services monthly, but the usage-based component quarterly, several different billing plans are available.