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A common question we get asked by our customers is: “What data are we required to send to m3ter?”. To some extent the data we need from you will depend on the details of the usage-based pricing solution you implement on the m3ter platform. However, there’s a limited core set of business and operational data we typically require from you and which is independent of the end-customer usage data you’ll be sending for your rating and billing purposes. This topic summarizes the core business and operational data we’ll require from you and explains the types of more specific end-customer data we’ll need relevant to your particular usage-based pricing solution: You may also have questions regarding how a Subject Access Request (SAR) regarding Personal Data made under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) would be handled by m3ter:

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User’s Data

We’ll require some details of the people in your organization who become m3ter Users:
  • Their name and e-mail address so we can identify them as Users.
  • What we do with this data - how we process and store it - is covered in our Privacy Notice.

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End-Customer’s Data

Setting up your m3ter Organization will require you to enter data about your end-customers. This will comprise:
  • Any end-customer data required to create and configure key m3ter entities, such as your end-customer Accounts and service Contracts on Accounts.
  • In general terms, the details of their charge rates for billing them when pricing up their Product Plans.
We need this minimum amount of data to be able to identify your end-customers in m3ter and understand their contracts with yourselves, and therefore to ensure we are able to generate sound and complete end-customer bills. In many cases, this data will be sent through to m3ter via an integration with one of your 3rd-party systems.

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Personal Data

  • Any Personal Data you send is confined to certain fields on the Account configuration object. Under the Data Processing Agreement, the only fields you are allowed to use for any of your end-customer Personal Data in m3ter are the name, address, and emailAddress fields on an Account - see the Create Account request schema as documented in our API Reference. See also section 4.2 of the Terms of Service.
  • We appreciate that many of your end-customers will be businesses, and in those cases these fields on the Account object won’t contain Personal Data anyway. These fields act as labels to identify your end-customers and it is your choice what data you use to populate these fields - either personal or non-personal.

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Usage Data

The usage data we require will be wholly dependent on the usage-based pricing schema you want to apply to charge and bill your end-customers for consuming your products and services. Given the wide scope m3ter offers, in terms of the pricing complexity you can set up for charging your customers, this usage data can vary enormously. Here are some examples to illustrate how the usage data you’ll need to send us to implement your usage-based pricing and billing solution can vary:
  • Suppose you run a SaaS company that provides a cloud storage and cleanup service for corrupted graphics files. You want to charge your end-customers for this service on the basis of a count of the number of corrupted files submitted for cleanup together with the total storage measured at the end of any given billing period. The usage data you’ll need to send us will therefore include metadata on each end-customer’s number of files submitted and the cumulative storage volume of the files.
  • Suppose you provide a cloud service which allows your end-customers to develop and host software applications. You intend to charge customers for this application build-and-host cloud service by total number of applications built and hosted on your service and by count on the number of requests made to their applications. The usage data you’ll need to send us will therefore include metadata on the number of applications each end-customer has built together with application request counts.
  • Suppose you offer a service to manage and process orders and deliveries for online retailers. Your basic pricing model uses a tiered structure on number of orders/deliveries you handle per billing period for an end-customer. You also want to include a fixed charges for product add-ons you offer, such as express delivery, which your customers can select for on an order-by-order basis. The usage data you’ll need to send us will therefore include metadata on the number of orders each end-customer sends through for processing together with a count of the number of product add-ons they request.

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Personal Data - Inclusion in Usage Data

We are conscious that Personal Data should only be processed for specific purposes, therefore as stated in our Terms of Service, you are not permitted to send any Personal Data in Usage Data.

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GDPR and m3ter

With respect to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and in the case of individuals making a Subject Access Request (SAR) regarding Personal Data sent to m3ter or collected by m3ter:
  • User’s Data. If a person in your organization who has become a m3ter user makes a SAR, we as the Data Controller would respond to that request.
  • End-Customer’s Data. m3ter is the Data Processor of any data relating to your end-customers, and you are the Data Controller. Therefore, we would direct any SAR issued by a person whose Personal Data has been processed in this way by m3ter to you for your action.