Enhanced Unit-Based Prepaid with Drawdown
Unit-Based Prepaid with Drawdown lets you sell prepaid usage in non-currency units and track how those units are consumed over time.
You can use it to create prepaid pools for units such as tokens, API calls, minutes, seats, or credits, and then draw down those units as customers consume the service.
This page describes the enhanced capabilities for unit-based prepaid with drawdown.
These enhancements apply only to prepaid with drawdown prepayment charges where Charge Function is Prepayment and Commitment Type is Unit. They do not apply to currency-based prepaid with drawdown charges or to configurations that do not use the enhanced unit-based feature set.
To enable these enhancements, submit a request through Zuora Global Support.
How unit-based prepaid with drawdown works
With unit-based prepaid with drawdown, you configure:
- a prepayment charge that creates the prepaid fund
- a usage charge with charge function Drawdown that consumes from that fund
- subscription-level options that let you override selected charge settings when you place an order
- account-level monitoring that helps you track balances, consumption, rollover, and overage
Key concepts
- Prepayment charge: A prepayment charge is a one-time or recurring charge with charge function Prepayment. It is the charge your customer pays to receive prepaid units.
- Fund: A fund is the time-boxed balance created from a prepayment charge. The fund holds the prepaid units that can be consumed during its validity period.
- Usage charge: A usage charge with charge function Drawdown consumes units from the funds created by the prepayment charge.
Key capabilities of Enhanced Unit-Based Prepaid with Drawdown
- Shareable fund pools - You can create account-level funds and allow eligible usage charges to draw from the same prepaid pool across subscriptions. If account hierarchy is enabled, child accounts can draw from a parent account's centralized fund pool.
- Drawdown priority - You can control consumption order by assigning a priority to the prepayment charge. The system consumes the lowest priority number first. If multiple eligible funds have the same priority, Zuora uses a first-expired-first-out tie breaker.
- Flexible validity periods - You can configure validity periods independently of billing periods. You can align a fund to the charge start, term start, term end, or a specific anchor date at subscription time.
- Advanced proration - If a unit-based prepayment charge starts in the middle of a validity period, you can choose whether to prorate the funded units based on the overlap ratio or grant the full units for the partial period.
- Advanced rollover - You can control whether unused units roll over, how long rollover lasts, what end-date rule applies, whether rollover funds use a different priority, and whether rollover funds are consumed first or last.
- Account-level monitoring - You can monitor prepaid balances, expiring units, drawdown usage, and overage usage from the Account Details page and the Account Level Prepaid Consumption Dashboard.
Examples
Example 1: AI assistant credits sold by seat
A software company sells an AI assistant add-on to enterprise customers. The customer purchases 10 seats per month, and each seat grants 1,000 tokens. In the product catalog, the prepayment charge UOM is Seat, the default quantity is 10, the prepayment UOM is Token, and the prepayment units value is 1000. Zuora calculates a total prepaid balance of 10,000 tokens for that charge instance. The customer then uses a drawdown usage charge to consume tokens as end users interact with the AI assistant. If usage exceeds the available balance, the extra usage can be billed as overage.
Example 2: Shared credits across multiple subscriptions
A customer wants one centralized credit pool for several AI-enabled products under the same account. You can create a unit-based prepayment charge with account-level scope so eligible usage charges across subscriptions draw from the same fund. If the customer also wants unused units to carry into the next period, you can enable rollover and choose whether rollover funds are consumed before or after normal funds.