Product configuration explained

User permissions for managing products

Users must have admin permissions to manage products and set pricing and payment configuration. If you have a team of sales agents who will not manage products, you can create their user accounts without these permissions.

See Manage users.

Groups, units, and pricing elements

The following table describes the groups, units, and pricing elements you can use in BillPro to make pricing faster and more accurate.

Groups

Groups organise and segment your products and filter the products in the catalogue. For example, a general property insurer might create groups to segment their policies by Home, Automobile, and Watercraft.

Units

Units describe the increments by which your products are divisible. For example, item, hour, month, km, kg, plan.

Discounts

Discounts decrease the price of products and orders by a percentage or an amount in the currency of the product or order's pricing. You can select discounts for products and orders (if pricing is not locked in the product). In the API, you can only add custom discounts to orders.

Fees

Fees increase the gross price of the product after tax. You can select fees for products and orders (If pricing is not locked in the product). In the API, you can only add custom fees to orders.

Taxes

Calculate and display a tax as part of a product's price. Taxes are inclusive and for information purposes only. You can select a tax for products and orders (if product pricing is not locked). In the API, you can only add custom taxes to orders.

See Create product groups and pricing elements.

Pricing and payment configuration options

BillPro offers flexible pricing and payment configuration, so you can decide how to configure your products based on the following options.

1. Set pricing and payment configuration when creating your products. This means that users cannot change the configuration when creating orders. This makes sense if your price and payment terms are constant, and it can save you time and improve accuracy.
2. Leave pricing and payment configuration unlocked in your products so users can set them individually when creating orders. This approach gives more flexibility but requires sales agents to perform more steps and accept more responsibility.
3. A hybrid approach to suit your range of products and selling styles, such as a fixed base price with configurable payment terms. This approach balances consistency with flexibility.

Currencies

If you work with multiple currencies, your merchant account will have a set of acceptance currencies in which you can accept payments.

When creating your product catalogue, you can make a separate product for each currency with the price in that currency and then maintain your products and their pricing. Or, you can use currency conversions to automatically convert the price in orders from the price of a single product in your chosen base currency.

See Configure currency conversions

Choose between single payment or instalment products

You may want to offer the same product with both single-payment and instalment pricing. Here are some things to consider when deciding which type of product to create in BillPro

When working with the UI, consider the following points.

For single-payment products:

• Users can add multiple products to one order.
• In an order, the user can always split payments to create instalments and configure the instalment payments.
• You cannot lock payments. If you lock pricing, the user cannot change the total amount and pricing elements, but they can still split payments in an order.

For instalment products:

• Users can only add one product to an order.
• If you lock pricing, users cannot change an order's total amount or pricing elements. However, if you do not lock the payment configuration, the user can still make a single payment in the order.
• If you lock pricing and payment configuration, users cannot change the pricing or payments, and they cannot take a single payment for an order.

See Create a single payment product and Create an instalment product.

Create products to use with the API

You can also create orders with the BillPro API. Integrating with your business systems allows you to automatically set custom pricing and payment configurations. This approach allows you to control the customised pricing and payment configuration, and your sales agents can process the payments.

When you create orders with the API, the order must always have the same purchase type as the product. You cannot activate or deactivate the option to Split Payments.

When you create orders with the API, you can set a new configuration if the product's pricing or payment configuration is not locked. You cannot select pricing elements (as in the UI), and you must always set an amount for each pricing element. If the initial payment will be 0 because there is no deposit or a large initial discount, you must set the correct pre-authorisation amount.

For more details, see Orders.