Prepaid credit allows you to create a credit balance that can be allocated across different cost centers, users or user groups. This is a great way for you to effectively offer controlled prepaid budgets to your stakeholders, whether they are sales and marketing departments or 3rd party resellers and distributors. The key benefits are:
- You can offset the printing costs for your dealers and distributors by allocating individual budgets per cost center
- Prepaid credit can be offered as a bonus for preferential or high-performing resellers/distributors
- Cost center budgets are easily tracked, managed and can be topped off
- You can allocate prepaid budget to individual users of the account for the highest level of control
- Less invoices! Orders placed against prepaid credit will not generate invoices
- We support several currencies (AUD, USD, CAD, CHF, EUR, GBP, NOK, SEK, DKK)
Here is a short video that demonstrates how quickly you can set-up your Prepaid credit with a Budget via the Cost Center approach.
In this article:
- Enabling and loading prepaid credit to your account
- Managing prepaid credit
- Assigning prepaid credit to users
- Assigning prepaid credit to a cost center
Enabling and loading prepaid credit to your account
This feature needs to be enabled in the back-end first and the credit needs to be prepaid (we will send you an invoice) before it can be added to your account. Contact us for more information.
Important things to consider:
- The prepaid credit will not be added to your account until the invoice is paid.
- If you would like orders to be placed against the print credit only, avoiding additional invoices to be generated, we recommend to deactivate 'Invoice' as a payment method.
- Orders paid via credit card do not count against prepaid credit.
- If you would like to keep several payment methods (i.e invoice, prepaid credit, credit card) make sure the user group has permissions to use the prepaid credit payment method.
- Orders paid with 'Prepaid credit' as a payment method will not generate invoices. However you can download an order confirmation receipt from your order history if needed.
- If an order's value exceeds the prepaid credit balance available, you will need to use an alternative payment method or top-up your credit.
Managing prepaid credit
You will find this feature in the Settings of your account (Settings > Payment). There you will see the total amount of Prepaid print credit that you requested and that can be allocated. By clicking on Manage you can see the full top-up history.
Note: You need to be an account Admin to see the Payment module within your account settings. If you can't see the prepaid print credit section in the Payment tab, it means that this feature has not been activated in our backend yet.
To start allocating and distributing the prepaid credit you need to create budget section(s). Click on Add new budget. There are 2 options to choose from:
1. User allocation: This budget type enables the allocation of credit to a user group or to an individual user.
2. Cost center allocation: This budget type is set on a cost center level, which allows any users linked to it to use the prepayment assigned. More on how to create a Cost Center here.
Note: Regardless of the type of budget selected, you need to enter a budget name (e.g. the name of the department or the location the budget will be used by) and the amount that will be allocated to it (this must be lower than the total credit available in the account).
The new entries will be visible on the main page, marked with a different colour depending on whether they are User (orange) or Cost center (blue) allocated credit.
You can also download a report using the dedicated button.
Click on Manage to modify (top-up or withdraw) the credit to a user or to a cost center. Here you can also view the history of movements.
Important: You can also remove the cost center/user in case it is no longer in use. The amount left will return to the 'Not allocated' section of that Budget.
Tip: The 'down arrow' on the right side of the budget will open the section to view the split of the budget (i.e the different users or cost centers included in that budget).
After you start placing orders, you will be able to see which orders were placed against the Prepaid print credit in your order history.
Assigning prepaid credit to users
You can allocate the budget in 2 different ways:
1. To individual or multiple users
In this case, you can select one or more users from a drop-down menu and allocate the same amount for all or different amounts for each individual.
2. To individual or multiple groups
In this case, you can select one or more groups from a drop-down menu and allocate the same amount for all groups or different amount for each group.
Note: When assigning a budget to a group you will need to indicate the amount that will be available for each user of that group. For example, if you add 100 to the group, it means every user in the group will get 100.
More on how to assign and manage payment methods in your account and/or user groups here.
Assigning prepaid credit to a cost center
Cost Centers can help you allocate costs between different departments, functions, business units or countries. They are linked to one or several billing entities, allowing you to control who is using the budget.
You can read more about how to create a new cost center here.
Select Add new budget via Cost Center allocation.
Once the Budget is created, click on Allocate cost center credit. The cost centers preloaded in your account will show in the filed 'Select Cost Center' as a drop down list. Select one, and assigned the amount of credit you want to allocate to it.
