Prepaid Usage with Drawdown: Advance-Billed Usage Services with Balance Tracking

NetSuite introduces Prepaid Usage with Drawdown, a new service type for usage-based billing that lets customers pay in advance, with actual usage deducted from a prepaid balance. This applies to subscription and plan records and adds new behavior to subscription service lines.

What Changed

A new service type, Prepay with Drawdown, is available on subscription and plan records. Prepaid service lines link to usage service lines and support two frequency modes:

• One-Time — A fixed prepayment amount is drawn down by usage. When the balance hits zero, the usage line reverts to pay-as-you-go billing. To add more prepayment, you must create new subscription or subscription lines for both prepayment and usage.
• Auto-Refill — Requires a configurable minimum balance (0 or greater). When the prepaid balance drops to the minimum after rating completes on submitted usage, new prepayment charges are generated automatically.

Key constraints on prepaid service lines:

• Prepaid lines can only be linked to usage lines while the subscription is in Draft status.
• Prepaid lines themselves cannot be independently modified, activated, or suspended — they activate when their linked usage services activate.
• Cross-subscription drawdown is supported: a prepay service on one subscription can be consumed by usage services on a different subscription.

At subscription term end, the remaining prepaid balance can either be refunded or recognized as revenue without a refund.

Revenue Recognition Conflict

This feature is incompatible with the Create Revenue Elements for Subscription Revisions preference. If that preference is enabled, you cannot activate Prepay with Drawdown. Oracle's documentation does not clarify whether disabling that preference mid-stream has side effects on existing revenue elements — verify in a sandbox before changing this in production.

What to Do

1. Navigate to Setup > Company > Enable Features (Administrator).
2. On the Transactions subtab, in the Billing section, check Prepay with Drawdown.
3. Confirm that Create Revenue Elements for Subscription Revisions is unchecked. If it is currently enabled, assess the impact on existing revenue elements before disabling it.
4. If you have SuiteScript customizations on subscription records (e.g., beforeSubmit or afterSubmit User Event scripts), test them against the new prepaid line behavior — particularly the restriction that prepaid lines only link in Draft status and auto-activate with their usage counterparts.
5. If you use SuiteBilling APIs or workflows that modify subscription line status, verify that they do not attempt to independently activate or suspend prepaid lines, as this will fail.
6. For integrations that create subscriptions via REST or SOAP web services, test that prepaid line creation and linking works correctly through your integration path, and that cross-subscription drawdown scenarios function as expected.
7. Test both One-Time and Auto-Refill scenarios in a sandbox, paying attention to the rating-then-refill timing on Auto-Refill and the pay-as-you-go fallback on One-Time.