Chargeback management for Quickbase has arrived

Chargeback management for Quickbase has arrived

Introduction

Do you split the bill for your Quickbase subscription among multiple departments or business units? If so, governing your account is about to get easier. Many of the large enterprises using Quickbase charge portions of their Quickbase bill back to the various groups within their company. Chargeback management is the practice of tracking your account usage and using that to determine how much to charge each group using your Quickbase account. Typically this is breakdown is calculated based on number of apps or the number of users each department is using.

You can now establish a single source of truth for managing your chargebacks using Quickbase Sync. Specifically, you can pull data about your account’s users, apps, and user access using our new Admin Console sync channel. You can use that sync channel to create your own custom account management application, allowing you to manage your chargebacks in an easier and more transparent manner.

 

Getting started managing chargebacks in Quickbase

While you’ll figure out the details of how to manage your chargebacks based on your company’s needs, you can get started quickly by creating a few core tables and relationships. First, create a new application to manage your chargebacks. You can also use this app to monitor other aspects of your account usage (for more information, see Easier Account Management using QB Sync). The dashboard below shows an example of what your app could look like, breaking down the number of users per department:

 

Next, you’ll want to create three connected tables: one for Users, one for Apps, and one for User Access. Note that, to protect the security of your account, only realm administrators can create these tables.

To manage chargebacks by department, you can then add two additional tables:

• a Departments table, to see account usage rolled up by department, and
• a Monthly Usage table, to see the level of each department’s usage in a given month

 

Adding those tables would give you an app diagram like this:

The tables circled in green are the connected tables. The tables circled in blue are standard tables.

 

Finally, you can schedule a pipeline to run once a month, to snapshot the user counts by department. The pipeline should have two steps. The first is to search the Departments table for all records, and the second adds a record to the Monthly Usage table for each department.

Your pipeline should look like this:

 

Monthly Usage Pipeline Step A: Search Records

The goal of Step A is to search the Departments table for all records.

Here’s how to set up Step A:

1. Create a new pipeline and give it a name.
2. Open the Quickbase channel from the channel list.
3. Under Account, select the user token connected to the account mgmt. application you’re working on.
4. Click Records, then drag the Search Records step onto the canvas as Step A.
5. Under Table, select Departments.
6. Under Fields, select # of Apps and # of Users.

 

Monthly Usage Pipeline Step B: Create Record

The goal of Step B is to loop through each department and create a monthly usage record for each one.

Here’s how to set up Step B:

1. Drag the Create Record step from the step list, onto the canvas as Step B. Be sure to drag it within the DO block so it is part of the loop.
2. Under Account, select the same user token you used for Step A.
3. Under Table, select the Monthly Usage table.
4. Under Select Fields to Specify Values, select # of Apps, # of Users, Date Snapshot Created, and Related Department Record ID#. Boxes for each field appear.
5. Find the matching field from Step A for # of Apps and drag it into the # of Apps
6. Find the matching field from Step A for # of Users and drag it into the # of Users
7. Find the Record ID# field from Step A and drag it into the Related Department Record ID#
8. Click into the Date Snapshot Created
9. Enter the following in the box: {{time.today}}
10. Click Schedule at the top of the page and select the monthly option.
11. Click Run to manually trigger the pipeline test it out.

NOTE: Of course, you can use the above method if you pay for Quickbase quarterly or annually as well. To do so, simply adjust the schedule for the pipeline as appropriate, and re-name your “Monthly Usage” table to “Quarterly Usage” or “Annual Usage”.

 

Further reading

About connected tables help article

Connecting to the Quickbase Admin Console help article

Easier Account Management using QB Sync community post

So You Want to Learn Pipelines community article