How do I analyze my Agency's Spending on LC Communications?

Modified on: Thu, 26 Sep, 2024 at 10:25 PM

In your agency account, we provide you features that help you analyze your agency's spend on LC Communications (LC Phone, LC Email, WhatsApp, etc)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

How to check your Agency's credit balance?
What does my Agency's Credit Balance mean?
How do I see a historical summary of my agency's spend across categories?
How do I drill down to a single transaction in more detail?
How and when is my card charged?
- Example 1
- Example 2
How can I Rebill the usage to my clients?
- If you are on the pro plan or higher
- If you are on the Starter or Freelancer plan
How can I download all transactions as a CSV?
How can I further analyze this data to understand my costs better?
I am paying both LC Communications and my previous provider (Twilio or Mailgun/SMTP). What can I do?
What happens if a payment fails?
What happens to my balance if I cancel?
My wallet has a balance but I cannot send sms and email?
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How to check your Agency's credit balance?

Please switch to your 'Agency View'

Click on 'Agency Settings'

Click on the 'Billing tab' > Wallet & Transactions

What does my Agency's Credit Balance mean?

When you use communication features like SMS, Calls, Voicemail drops, emails, or WhatsApp messages the cost associated with those communications are deducted from this credit balance. Sometimes this is also referred to as a wallet.

Please also refer to

LC Phone pricing structure
LC Email pricing structure
WhatsApp pricing Structure (Coming Soon)

Please Note that as of Nov 01, 2022 our rates in the US are 10% cheaper than Twilio & approximately 8% cheaper than Mailgun. Thank you to our Agencies for the overwhelming response. More power to you.

How do I see a historical summary of my agency's spend across categories?

You can see a detailed, message-by-message log of transactions by clicking on Detailed Transactions

This page would provide you with

A unified view of all logs across all your sub-accounts (aka locations)
A summary of your month on month spend from the last 3 months and associated categories

This will expand all categories and give you a summary of your spending by month for each individual category

Please Note:

The summary data is refreshed once daily. So sometimes you may need to wait upto 24 hours for most accurate reporting.

How do I drill down to a single transaction in more detail?

We provide you a detailed drill-down of each transaction/message which can be accessed by clicking the transaction ID in the log table

How and when is my card charged?

Based upon your auto-recharge rules on the Agency Settings -> Billing page, we charge your card with the recharge amount once your credit balance becomes lower than the threshold.

A few examples:

Example 1

This is also the default setting. In this scenario, once your credit balance goes below $10, your Agency's credit card would be charged $10 to get your balance up to $20.

Example 2

In this scenario, your Agency's card would get charged with $200 when your credit balance goes below $50 to take your credit balance up to $250

Please note that when charges to your credit card fail, we notify all agency admins in your agency account. SMS, Calls, Emails, etc for all your clients get hampered if your credit balance goes below $0.

Please note delays in payment processing may result in a one-time charge for double the recharge amount if account balance falls below $0. If your balance goes negative, the first initial recharge amount will be added to the transaction to bring your balance back above $0. If this charge does not raise your account balance above the specified threshold, a secondary charge (equal to the auto recharge amount) will be added to the transaction to ensure your balance exceeds the set auto recharge threshold. In total, this could result in a charge of double the recharge amount.

How can I Rebill the usage to my clients?

If you are on the pro plan or higher

LC Communication system is designed to work better with SaaS compared to Twilio or Mailgun. There are some inherent benefits of using LC Communications like

Instantaneous billing (no lag from Twilio webhooks)
Built-in ramp for new sub-accounts (locations) so that a new client doesn't run up your bill. This improves our agency's cash flow.
Error rate & Bounce rate monitoring to identify bad lists
Opt-out & Unsubscribe monitoring for spam reduction
Carrier complaints & violation monitoring for AUP violations to protect the sender's reputation

If you are on the pro plan or higher, you can easily rebill this usage to your clients using SaaS Mode (Phone & Email rebilling) and also include a markup to make a profit on the rebilling.

We no longer apply a markup when rebilling carrier charges and A2P 10DLC charges. This means that we pass along the original charges without any additional markup. Sometimes, customers may create a ticket with the expectation that their earnings will be exactly 2x, 3x, or 3.5x the amount they spend. However, this is not the case because we do not markup compliance charges and carrier fee charges.

Please refer to

The rebilling is designed such that HighLevel invoices you for usage and then invoices your clients on your behalf. The funds that you collect from your clients are deposited in your connected Stripe account.

Agency receives an invoice from HighLevel with the HighLevel Logo & Branding

Sub-accounts (your client locations) receive an invoice from you with your logo and branding that is configured in your Stripe account

This system is always prepaid. This means that agency will collect money upfront and maintain a positive cash flow.

If you are on the Starter or Freelancer plan

You can download a CSV report for the month as shown below and charge your clients using HighLevel invoices or an external billing platform.

In future, LC Communication rebilling without markup will be available for Freelancer accounts. ETA - December 15, 2022

How can I download all transactions as a CSV?

You can download all LC Communication (Phone, Email & WhatsApp) charges in form of a CSV by clicking the export button on the top right

Please note this data is for Agency users only. We advise you not to share these reports directly with your client as they will see the discounted pricing (HighLevel to Agency pricing).

Please note that we can provide you with last 1,000,000 (1 million) transactions due to storage limits.

How can I further analyze this data to understand my costs better?

A loom with instructions will be added soon. Please check back in a few days.

I am paying both LC Communications and my previous provider (Twilio or Mailgun/SMTP). What can I do?

By design LC Communications (LC Phone & LC Email) are enabled for your clients at this point moving forward. This means in most cases your old clients would still be on the old provider (Twilio for calls, SMS, and Mailgun/SMTP for emails). In this transition period, it is likely that you will be invoiced by HighLevel for the usage that happens on LC Communications and also by Twilio, Mailgun, or other SMTP providers for usage resulting from old sub-accounts that still use them.

The easiest way to resolve this situation is to move all your existing clients over to LC Phone & LC Email and close out your accounts with other providers.

Please Note:

Certain assets like call recordings do not migrate over. So if you need access to call recordings or logs for compliance or HIPAA regulations, you may want to keep operating your Twilio account in a dormant way.

What happens if a payment fails?

If the sms and email charges are left unpaid, we stop all outbound emails and sms.

What happens to my balance if I cancel?

We could refund the credit to the credit card linked in the agency account.

My wallet has a balance but I cannot send sms and email?

The balance needs to be at least 50% of the amount set for "when balance is lower than" for lc phones and emails.

But the rule has been set up where if it's less than 50% it will stop all outbound emails and SMS.

If your agency is sending large volume, to avoid not being able to send SMS and email when the balance is low, please increase the number here so when the balance is lower than 50$ so it will auto recharge sooner!

For example, if the amount set for "when balance is lower than" is $10, the current wallet balance needs to be more than $5 to send outbound emails/sms. This is to safeguard the account from going negative.

The balance in the usage summary doesn't make sense? Why is it dropping to $16.97 from $18.66 after a SMS transaction of 0.00711?

In the Phone Numbers ➝ Usage Summary page which shows Agency transactions for that subaccount, the wallet balance for the agency is used across all the subaccounts, so the wallet balance will follow a sequence when we look at a particular subaccount.

E.g. one SMS got charged for subaccount A and another call for subaccount B and then again SMS for A

So transactions went like

A: SMS1 ➝ $0.01 ➝ Balance: $9.99

B: Call1 ➝ $0.02 ➝ Balance: $9.97

A: SMS2 ➝ $0.01 ➝ Balance: $9.96

So when we view transactions under, it will show transactions just for subaccount A as

A: SMS1 ➝ $0.01 ➝ Balance: $9.99

A: SMS2 ➝ $0.01 ➝ Balance: $9.96

and when viewed for B

it will show

B: Call1 ➝ $0.02 ➝ Balance: $9.97

Why is my SMS cost so high?