Chargebee

Record attributed cloud spend against a Chargebee metered item price

CostGraph records each customer’s attributed cloud spend against a metered item price on their Chargebee subscription. Chargebee invoices it at the end of the billing term. The shared model, tag rules, and nightly behavior are on the Billing exports page.

Chargebee attaches usage to a subscription and an item price, not to a customer. This page says “recorded” rather than “reported” because Chargebee keeps one record per day and CostGraph overwrites it.

Before you begin

• Enable Automated Metered Billing on your Chargebee site. Without it, the usage API rejects every record.
• Create an item with metered enabled and give it a price. Price per cent.
• Add that item price to every subscription you intend to bill, from the date you want billing to start. See Chargebee behavior.
• Copy an API key from Settings > Configure Chargebee > API keys.

Connect

1. Connect the account

   In Integrations, click Chargebee, enter the API key, and enter your site name. The site name is the subdomain, so acme-test for acme-test.chargebee.com. CostGraph verifies the key against Chargebee before it saves anything, and stores it encrypted.

2. Bind an item price

   Bind a chargebee_ tag key to one of your metered item prices. CostGraph offers only item prices whose item is marked metered.

Tag spend by customer

The tag value must be a Chargebee subscription id. A customer with two subscriptions needs the tag to name the one that carries the cloud spend. Chargebee rejects usage for a subscription that doesn’t exist or doesn’t include the item price. CostGraph records the day with the rejection instead of billing it.

Usage record

Chargebee keeps one usage record per subscription, item price, and day. Each night CostGraph writes the day’s absolute total and replaces the record it wrote before. A day revised downward replaces the earlier figure with the lower one, with no credit note, as long as the term hasn’t been invoiced.

Field	Value
subscription_id	The tag value for that day
item_price_id	The item price the meter is bound to
quantity	The day’s total attributed spend, in cents
usage_date	The day the spend belongs to
note	The shared reconciliation fields: the day, whether this replaced an earlier figure, and what that figure was

Chargebee behavior

Chargebee accepts a usage date only if it falls inside the period the item price was active on the subscription. A meter bound to an item price you added today records nothing for earlier days. Those days are rejected and recorded as such, so add the item price from the date billing starts.

A day in a term Chargebee has already invoiced can’t be replaced. Late restatements to a closed term need a manual adjustment in Chargebee.