Subscriptions and reconciliation

A Pax8 or StreamOne connection brings every subscription the distributor holds for you into Outpost: the product, the seats, the term, and the cancel deadline. On the MSP plan, subscriptions also set the seat counts your clients are billed for, and a monthly reconciliation checks the distributor’s bill against what you billed. This page covers subscriptions, company mapping, cancel deadlines, subscription orders, agreement quantities, and reconciliation.

Before you begin

• A Pax8 or StreamOne connection. See Distributor connections.
• Reading subscriptions needs procurement:read. Placing subscription orders needs procurement:approve. Linking subscriptions to agreement lines needs psa:write. Reconciliation needs psa:read to read, psa:write to run and close, and psa:invoice to true up or ignore an item.

Find subscriptions

On the MSP plan, select Client billing > Subscriptions. On Home Lab, Essentials, and Enterprise, select Procurement > Subscriptions.

Each row shows the Product, Client, Quantity, Term, Term ends, Cancel deadline, Status, Unit cost, and, on the MSP plan, the Agreement line. Filter by Distributor, Client, Status, or Cancel deadline before, or select Unmapped only.

Subscriptions sync every day, and when the distributor’s webhook reports a change. To sync at once, select Sync now for Subscriptions on the connection.

Term	Values
Billing	Monthly, Annual, Every three years, One time
Commitment	No commitment, Monthly (NCE), Annual (NCE), Three years (NCE)
Status	Active, Pending, Trial, Suspended, Cancelled

Map companies to clients

Plans

MSP

A distributor lists subscriptions under its own companies. Outpost bills a subscription to a client only after you map the company to that client.

1. Select Settings > Integrations > Distributors and open the connection.
2. On the Company map card, find the Vendor company, choose the Client, and select Map.

Outpost never maps companies for you, even when the names look alike, because two companies with similar names are a common source of billing mistakes. A company maps to one client, and a client to one company on each connection. To change a mapping, select Unmap first. Subscriptions under an unmapped company are billed to nobody and show Unmapped.

Cancel deadlines

Microsoft NCE subscriptions can be canceled only shortly after their term starts. For a subscription with an NCE commitment term, the Cancel deadline is 7 days after the term starts, and the list counts it down. Once it passes, it shows Deadline passed.

48 hours before a deadline, Outpost raises an alert in the procurement category. The alert clears when the deadline passes or the subscription is canceled. To send deadlines to another tool, subscribe a webhook to subscription.cancel_deadline. See API keys and webhooks.

Change a subscription

Change quantity and Cancel on a subscription place real orders with the distributor, and change what it bills you. Three things must be in place:

• Live ordering is turned on for the connection. Turning it on needs integrations:admin and a second factor. See Turn on live ordering.
• You hold procurement:approve.
• You confirm each order explicitly, as below.

1. Select Change quantity, and enter the New quantity. To cancel, select Cancel instead.
2. Check the Expected monthly change.
3. Select I understand this places a real order with followed by the distributor.
4. Select Place order, or Place cancel order.

The order is queued and placed with the distributor. Recent subscription orders shows it as Queued, Sent to the distributor, Done, or Failed.

A commitment term may not allow a cancel after its cancel deadline.

Drive agreement quantities from subscriptions

Plans

MSP

A subscription can set the quantity of a line on the client’s agreement, so a client who adds seats in Pax8 is billed for them on the next invoice without anyone editing the agreement.

1. On the subscription’s row, under Agreement line, select Link.
2. Choose the client’s Agreement and the Line.
3. Select Link line.

The line’s quantity follows the subscription’s seat count, updated every hour. Several subscriptions can drive one line, and their seats are added together. The line must be billed per seat, per user, or as a fixed amount. To stop, select Unlink. See Client agreements.

Reconcile a month

Plans

MSP

Reconciliation sets the distributor’s bill for a month against what each client was billed, subscription by subscription, and flags the differences.

Outpost reconciles last month on the 3rd of each month at 06:00 UTC. To run a month yourself:

1. Select Client billing > Reconciliation.
2. Under Run reconciliation, choose the Distributor and the Month.
3. Select Run reconciliation.

Running a month again replaces its results, unless the month is closed.

Open the month to see each item with the Vendor qty, Billed qty, RMM seats, Directory seats, Vendor cost, Sell price, Margin, Billed, Flags, and Outcome.

Flags

Flag	Meaning
Pro rata	The distributor billed part of a period, such as seats added mid-month.
Seat drift	On a per-seat or per-user line, the distributor’s seat count differs from the client’s users from directory sync, or from its endpoint count when there is no directory.
Unbilled	The client was billed for fewer seats than the distributor billed you, or not at all, or the subscription drives no agreement line.
Price mismatch	The distributor’s unit cost differs from the synced subscription’s cost, or the client was billed below cost.
Unmapped	The subscription’s company is not mapped to a client.

True up or ignore

For each flagged item, choose an Outcome:

• True up raises a draft invoice to the client for the seats the distributor billed that the client was not, at a sell price. The price is the linked agreement line’s price, else the price of the catalog item with the vendor’s SKU, else the distributor’s sell price. A true-up is never priced at your cost. An item with no price shows No price set, and needs a price before it can be trued up.
• Ignore records that the difference is expected.

An Unmapped item cannot be trued up. Select Map the company first.

When the month is settled, select Close month. A closed month is read only.

Plans

On Home Lab, Essentials, and Enterprise, a Pax8 or StreamOne connection syncs subscriptions and the distributor’s bills, and subscription orders work the same. There are no clients to map, no agreement lines to drive, and no reconciliation.

Verify

• After a sync, the subscriptions list shows the distributor’s subscriptions with their terms and cancel deadlines.
• After a reconciliation, Client billing > Reconciliation lists the month with its Items and Flagged counts.

Next steps

• Client agreements
• Invoice clients