Skip to main content

​
What a feature is

A feature is a commercial modifier, something that changes how a product behaves, rather than a thing you sell in its own right. You won’t find a feature as a standalone line on your invoice the way you would a product. Instead, features attach to a product’s pricing and adjust the charge that pricing produces. You’ll configure features while you’re setting up a product’s pricing, not from a separate part of the catalog.

​
The six product-level feature types

Payment terms and service fees aren’t product-level features. They’re configured at the contract or phase level instead, so they apply across everything sold in that phase rather than to one product. See contracts: features for that set.

​
Discounts

A discount can be fixed (a flat amount off), percent (a percentage off), or quantity-based (a number of units the customer doesn’t pay for). Which one you pick depends on how you want the reduction to scale: a fixed discount stays the same regardless of the bill size, a percent discount scales with it, and a quantity discount scales with usage rather than dollars.

​
Tax

A tax feature is either manual, where you enter the rate yourself, or resolved through Avalara using a tax code, or through Anrok using a tax category. This sits alongside the tax code you set on the product itself, the product-level tax code identifies what’s being sold for tax purposes, while a tax feature on the pricing determines the rate actually applied.

​
Free units, grants, and consumptions

These three work together to model usage-based entitlements. A grant issues a pool of units to the customer, triggered by an event you choose, for example when an invoice is approved. Consumptions define how usage events draw that pool down. Free units are the simpler cousin of this: a flat number of units the customer isn’t billed for, without the full grant and consumption machinery.

​
Commitments

A commitment sets a minimum spend the customer is held to on this product, guaranteeing you a certain amount of revenue even if actual usage falls short.

​
Where features apply

Product-level features affect only that one product. If you want a discount, tax rule, or commitment to apply across everything in a phase instead of one product at a time, configure it as a contract-level feature. See contracts: features for what’s available there, it’s an overlapping but not identical set.