A customer class defines a standard set of billing, invoicing, and other parameters shared across a category of customers. Rather than configuring each customer individually, an administrator configures the settings once within a customer class and then assigns that class to all customers in that category. Each customer then inherits the class settings, ensuring consistency and reducing setup errors.
For example, if your Cloud PBX customers are charged automatically by credit card and your SIP trunking customers pay manually upon receiving an invoice, you can create two customer classes with different billing settings: Net 21 days with automatic credit card charging and immediate suspension for Cloud PBX, and Net 30 days with a grace period before suspension for SIP trunking. Assigning the appropriate class to a new customer applies all of these settings at once, and any future policy change only needs to be made in one place.
The most commonly configured areas in a customer class are:
- Business model and currency – determines the type of services available to customers in this class and the currency used for billing.
- Invoicing – defines how invoices are produced for customers in this class, including invoice generation rules, billing period closure, and payment terms.
- Finance defaults – defines settings such as rounding and xDR exports, which apply regardless of whether invoicing is enabled.
- Taxation – defines which taxation method or plug-in applies to customers in this class.
- Notifications – defines which events trigger notifications, which notification set is used, and how notifications are delivered (for example, via email or SMS).
A customer class also controls additional settings, including custom fields, measured services, fraud traffic profiles, self-care portal settings, and personal data protection (GDPR).
