A Billing statement is generated on the 2nd day of each month, and is designed to accompany an invoice by providing a granular historical view of every billing transaction that occurred for the devices in your organization for a given month. A Billing Statement is useful for customers that want to get a deeper look at the transactions that occurred during the month and how each of them adds up to the totals included in the invoice. If you have questions about your invoice, or want to analyze the underlying data, the Billing Statement is the best place to look.
The goal of the Billing Statement is to allow customers to easily manipulate and analyze their own billing transaction data in a format that is familiar and accessible to most finance and operations teams — a spreadsheet. We deliver the data in a raw CSV format, with each transaction split into its own row. While looking at thousands of rows of raw CSV data can be overwhelming, the intention is customers will apply their own pivot tables and summarizations to analyze and aggregate the data in the way that makes most sense for their business operations.
How can I access my billing statement?
Billing Statements can be found under the Statements page of the Billing section.
Once you navigate to the Statements page, you will see a list of Billing Statements that have been generated for your organization. The earliest billing statement will be April 2020, to retrieve an earlier statement contact email success@hologram.io.
Once you click Download CSV a CSV file will be automatically downloaded to your browser. Once the download is complete, open the file using your favorite spreadsheet program— we recommend Excel or Google Sheets. We do not recommend using the Numbers application on your Mac.
Understanding the billing statement
On the Statements page you will see 3 values:
- Charges — This is a running total of all of the charges accrued during the billing period.
- Balance added — If you added balance to your account throughout the month, you will see the total here.
- Statement total — The total outstanding amount after accounting for charges and balance added throughout the month.
Any charges are reflected as negative transactions, and any balance additions are positive transactions.
What should I expect to see in my billing statement?
Your billing statement will contain one row for every transaction that occurred throughout the previous month. A transaction — and therefore each row — represents a billing event such as an SMS message, a SIM's monthly recurring charge, a single data usage session, monthly recurring charges for new SIM activations, or a data plan change (among others).
Each transaction contains the following columns described below. In some cases, some of the columns may be blank if data for that column is not applicable or not available.
Field names and descriptions
| Column name | Description |
|---|---|
| Transaction ID | Unique ID for the transaction. This is helpful in case you have a question and want to ask the Hologram support team about a certain transaction, you can use this Transaction ID as a reference. |
| Timestamp | Date and time that the transaction occurred. Note: this is not the precise time of a data session or usage charge. The timestamp refers to the time the transaction took place rather than the timing of any usage-based event. |
| Charge Type | Represents the type of charge for the given transaction. See table below for each type and its description. |
| Affected Devices | Count of the number of devices affected by a transaction. Most transactions are for 1 device, but for certain charge types - such as for a Bulk Data Plan - many devices are activated at once, so this field would reflect the number of devices included in a given transaction. |
| ICCID | The unique identifier for the SIM that the transaction references. This will be present on all transactions that include only 1 device. If a transaction affects multiple devices, this field will be empty. |
| Link ID | One of the identifiers for the SIM |
| IMEI | Unique identifier for your device. We will provide the IMEI in the Billing Statement for all transactions where we have it in our systems. Not all carriers provide the IMEI to us for all sessions. If we do not receive the IMEI from the carrier, this field will be blank. |
| Data Overage Bytes | Count of the number of bytes that are being charged for in a given transaction. To convert from bytes to MB, multiply the bytes by 1,000,000. |
| Transaction Amount | Amount being charged for a given transaction. |
| Device Tags |
Tags assigned to a given device by the customer. |
Charge types and explanations
| Column name | Description |
|---|---|
| SIM Renewal | The monthly recurring charge per SIM. |
| Data Usage | Charge for data that is not included with any plan. Note: data usage that is included as part of a plan does not appear anywhere in this statement. This Billing Statement only includes transactions that lead to a charge, therefore any covered data usage is not present in this statement. |
| SMS | Fee for each outbound SMS message sent from a device. |
| Data Plan | Monthly recurring charges for new device activations on a data plan. Per SIM monthly recurring charges are charged at the beginning of each billing cycle. This only applies for the first month in which a device is activated in subsequent months, the charge will be included as a SIM Renewal charge type. |
| Bulk Data Plan | When many devices are activated on a data plan at once. |
| Plan Change | Fee to adjust for mid-month data plan changes. |
| Phone Number Activation | Fee for activating a phone number. |
| Phone Number Renewal | Fee for renewing a phone number. |
| APN Service Fee | Fee for APN service. |
| Overbilling Correction | Corrects transactions that were overcharged for. |
What is not included in my billing statement?
- Any data usage that is included under a plan (meaning not overage data) would not appear in this Billing Statement as that is a $0 transaction and this Billing Statement only covers billing transactions.
- This billing statement does not provide a view into every single session for each device. The minimum amount for a billing transaction is $0.25. To view detailed device usage, we recommend using a Usage Report.
To best understand your bill, we typically see users download these CSV files, and then use simple Pivot Tables to group transactions together by 'Charge Type.' This would give you a SUM for all charges of a given type.
FAQs
-
How can I view this data grouped by day or by device?
The data provided in thisCSVfile is meant to be manipulated in a spreadsheet application (such as Excel or Google Sheets). We recommend creating a Pivot table to view the data so that you can get a summarized or aggregated view. -
A lot of my devices appear to not be using data during the month. Is this accurate?
No, this Billing Statement only tracks data usage that incurred a charge during the month. Some devices may be on plans that include data as part of the monthly fee. In this case, the data usage would not appear on the Billing Statement as a unique transaction unless the device usage exceeded the plan amount. If the data usage for a device was less than the plan amount there would be no additional charge for that data, and hence no transaction record in the billing statement. If the device exceeded the allotted plan amount during the month, that usage (the number of bytes and the cost) would appear as a transaction in the Billing Statement. To get a full view of all device usage, we recommend using a Usage Report. -
Should I use the Billing Statement to get a complete view of all my device usage during the month?
No. We do not recommend using the Billing Statements to analyze all device usage. The reason for this is that not all usage will appear in this statement. Any data usage that is included with a plan is a $0 transaction, and would therefore not be included in this sheet. If you want to get a view of all device usage, we recommend using a Usage Report. -
Why are some transaction rows missing the IMEI?
We do not receive the IMEI back from the carrier in all instances. We provide the IMEI for all transactions where it is provided to us. -
What is the affected devices column?
In most cases, this number will be 1 which represents a single device. However, for certain charge types - such as for a Bulk Data Plan - many devices are activated at once, so this field would reflect the number of devices included in a given transactions. -
Why are my transactions negative?
Negative transactions represent a charge to your account. Any balance additions or adjustments will be positive transactions. -
Can I see each and every data session in this Billing Statement?
No, the billing statement groups data sessions by at least $0.25 increments per device. So if a device had many very small data sessions (and the sum cost for all of them totaled less than $0.25) they would not appear in the billing statement until the $0.25 threshold was reached. Some $0.25 transactions may represent 1 data session or it may represent many data sessions. The Billing Statement only provides a view into billing transactions of at least $0.25. To get a detailed view of device usage, we recommend a Usage Report. -
Why are there so may charges for $0.25 or $0.26?
Our billing waits until there is a charge of at least $0.25 when creating a new transaction. This means that we do not create a transaction row for every single session a device has. Some transactions may be a single session, and others could be any number of sessions aggregated together once the total cost for those sessions is equal to or exceeds $0.25. Therefore, this statement should not be used to count the number or timing of data usage sessions. -
How can view data per day without the timestamp?
To view data in aggregate by day, simply insert 2 blank columns next to the Timestamp column and add a SPLIT function to the new the first new column, using a space as the delimiter. The formula looks like this in Google Sheets:=SPLIT(B2," ",FALSE,FALSE) -
How do I prevent the ICCID numbers from becoming truncated with zeros?
When importing the Billing Statement CSV, certain applications will truncate the 18 to 22 character ICCID that contain leading 0 digits. To prevent this from happening, format the ICCID column as 'Text' when importing the data into your spreadsheet tool.