[Creating and Managing Bills] A customer is regularly billed for consumption charges. What must exist before a customer’s usage can be calculated for billing purposes?

A Usage Subscription is the foundational agreement or contract that must be established before any consumption charges can be calculated. This subscription defines the specific product or service being consumed, the unit of measure, the pricing model (e.g., rate per unit), and the billing frequency. Without this active subscription, the system has no basis for rating, calculating, or billing the customer for their usage. It is the primary entity that links a customer to a usage-based service.

A. Usage Calculation Request: This is a process or job that initiates the calculation, but the subscription must already exist for the request to have something to calculate.
B. Usage Request: This is a generic term for a transactional request and not the core contractual agreement required for billing.
C. Usage Subscription Quantity: This represents the amount of usage consumed, which is determined during the calculation process, not a prerequisite for it.
E. Usage Transaction: These are the individual records of consumption that are fed into the calculation process, but the subscription must exist first to define the rules for processing them.

1. Oracle® Fusion Cloud SCM

Implementing Subscription Management (Release 24B)

F91531-02

Chapter 11: Usage Processing

Section: How You Process Usage for Subscriptions.

The document states

"To bill your customers for usage

you must first create a subscription with a usage-based product. The subscription can be a new one or an existing subscription to which you have added a usage-based product." This explicitly identifies the subscription as the initial requirement.

2. Oracle® Fusion Cloud SCM

Using Subscription Management (Release 24B)

F91530-02

Chapter 2: Subscriptions

Section: Overview of Subscriptions.

This section defines a subscription as the "negotiable agreement between a business and a customer for a recurring service

" establishing it as the prerequisite contract that governs the entire billing relationship

including usage-based charges.