Subsidies, also referred to as cashback or rebates, are discounts provided to the customer to offset the cost of their recurring services i.e. a mobile tariff. Subsidies are only applied to services and never to Hardware.

This article will provide an overview of how subsidy works in The Layer, however if you'd like a better understand of what subsidy is and how it's different to other discount types, see this article here.

Once you’ve created a quotation and added products and services to it, you can click on the name of the individual services to apply a subsidy.

You have two options ‘Term Subsidy’ and ‘Target Recurring Cost’.

Term Subsidy – Selecting this option allows you to enter in the total amount of subsidy that will be applied to the service over the entire term.

Target Recurring Cost – Selecting this option allows you to enter in the total cost of the service, once subsidy has been applied (when this option is selected, a calculation of the total cost without subsidy applied is provided, to make it easier to work out what the total will be after subsidy is applied).

Subsidy can be paid as a lump sum at the start of the contract. If you’d like the customer to receive the subsidy as an upfront payment, you don’t need to enable a subsidy schedule.

For more information on how one-off subsidies can be applied, see this article here.

Enabling a subsidy schedule allows you to select a frequency for payments, the total quantity of payments, and a start delay (number of units that you selected for frequency e.g if you select a monthly frequency and enter 1 into the Start Delay, payments will begin after 1 month).

These options allow you to customise how you pay subsidy to your customers.

For further details on scheduled subsidy see the article here.

Any user can add a subsidy to a quote, however, approval rules can be set up so that approval needs to be requested from line managers before the quote can be finalized. The user creating a quote will see a banner at the top of the screen with an option to request approval.

Let us know if you would like us to set this up, we can look at assigning approval rules to subsidies over a certain amount, and assigning a team to approve the quotes.

Once the quotation is converted to a Sales Order the Subsidy Fund and the Payment Schedule are also converted through. The subsidy fund will be visible in the sales order header tab under Finance Incentives.

After the subsidy has been converted from the sales order, the customer balance is updated accordingly.

To manage scheduled subsidy payments, your finance team can use the Subsidy Queue. This can be found in the Finance module. For more information on this take a look at this article here.

Permissions that can be enabled against individual User Profiles that relate to subsidy include:

Disallow Bulk Subsidy Operations - Users in this group cannot perform bulk operations in the Subsidy queue. This permission is required for the finance team.

Update Sales Order Financial Incentives - Users in this role can update the financial incentives in a sales order in the Header tab, or manage the subsidy queue.

Create Customer Transactions - Users in this role may create customer transactions, including line rental subsidy and hardware fund movements.