Vocabulary:
Active Lives
Any client who had a status of "active" for 5 days or more during the billing cycle or
Any client who had 1 or more schedules on the calendar during the billing cycle
SMS Messages
Incoming and outgoing text messages are all counted. Each segment (approximately 160 characters) is counted as one text message, i.e. If a text message is long and broken into multiple segments, each segment will count as one text message for the purposes of billing.
Minimum Lives
The number of lives you committed to paying for when you signed your contract
Calculating Your Invoice:
The billing team will
Determine how many "active lives" you had for the month, based on the criteria above and then multiply that by the amount you agreed to pay per client.
Determine how many text messages were exchanged between your portal, your caregivers, your agency users, and your clients and then multiply that by $0.015, per your contract agreement.
If you have fewer active lives than you committed to, they will charge you for the minimum number in your contract.
You can reduce your invoice in the following ways:
Make sure that you change the status of inactive clients as soon as possible and delete any future schedules.
Rather than sending an SMS message with details for several schedules in it or a lengthy message regarding care needs, compliance updates, upcoming meetings, etc, which might be split into multiple text messages for which you will be charged for each segment, send an email with the extensive information and then send a custom SMS message to notify people to check their email.
Please note: this is within your billing cycle, which may or may not be a calendar month. The following may help you understand it a bit better.
When you are billed:
NO: If you place a client inactive AND there is no schedule
Note: The client may have been active, but for less than 5 days into the month – such as when you were adding that client into the system. We don’t charge for the first few days as this allows you to set up a new client and get the system ready for that person. A good practice is to set up the client as soon as you have them but automatically set them as inactive unless they have and are ready for a schedule. You shouldn’t put in what you think their schedule would be or you would likely be charged for them.
YES: If a client is active, regardless of whether there is a schedule or not.
YES: If you place a client inactive AND there IS a schedule in the system.
Note: A good practice is that when a client is no longer with you – for whatever reason (even temporarily) – you should make them inactive and make sure there are no future schedules for that client.
YES: If you place a client inactive AND there is NO schedule, BUT they were active for over 5 days during the billing cycle, regardless of if they had a schedule or not.
If you have questions about your invoice, please send them to:
Reference these articles for how to change client status and send bulk email and SMS messages