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Additional Info - Meter Groups

E-automate uses meter groups for contract billing. You create meter groups to bill overages on contracts. The meter group concept allows you to group meters from multiple machines that are similar. If you have several pieces of equipment on a contract with more than one meter, you can group similar meters together for overage billing.

For example, assume you have two color-capable machines, machine one and machine two. Machine one has a black-and-white meter, a color meter and a scanner meter, for a total of three meters. Machine two has a total count meter and a black-and-white meter. When you created the model associated with machine two in e-automate, you created a virtual color meter to calculate color clicks on machine two. The formula you used was total count meter minus the black-and-white meter. While in reality machine two only has two meters, in e-automate it has three, total count, black-and-white and color (virtual). You can use virtual or calculated meters on contracts just like any other meter.

When you create a contract for machines one and two, you want to charge a single overage rate for black and white and allow the two black-and-white meters to share an allowance of clicks. You also want to charge a different, higher rate for color and allow the two machines to share a color allowance. Finally, you want to charge a different rate for scans that occur on machine one with an independent allowance. To accomplish this, you would create three meter groups. One group contains the black-and-white meter from each machine with a specified allowance and rate. A second group has the color meter from machine one and the virtual meter from machine two, with a specified allowance and rate. Finally, a third group includes the scanner meter from machine one with an allowance and rate.

The example above is just one way you could configure for this situation. If you wanted each machine to have its own allowance of clicks, you would need to create a meter group for each meter on each machine. This would necessitate you creating five meter groups, one for each meter on each machine that you want to bill.