Billing
Road bills Accounts, once a month. An Account can sit on either side of the ledger, or both: it can run charging stations as an operator, and it can hold charge cards for its users as an e-mobility customer. Which side a given charge falls on comes down to who owns the station and who owns the token that started the session.
Tariffs and billing plans
A tariff and a billing plan are often mixed up. One covers what a charge costs, the other covers a recurring fee:
- A tariff is the cost of a charging session. It lives on the connector, through the EVSE controller's tariff profile, and turns the energy and time of a charge into an amount. Tariffs are covered under charging station operation.
- A billing plan is a subscription. A charge card carries one for its monthly or annual card fee, a charging station carries one for the operator's cost of running it on Road, and an account tier is set by one too.
Who pays what
Billing splits three ways, by who is charged and for what.
Charge card usage
When a user charges with a card the Account owns, the operating CPO reports the session cost, which reaches Road over roaming as a CDR, and Road bills it to the Account together with the subscription fee for each active card. One invoice goes to the Account no matter how many users or cards it holds, with charges grouped under the card that ran them so a billing administrator can apportion them. Operators can report a session long after it happened, up to around two years depending on the locality and the roaming agreement, so an invoice often carries sessions from earlier months. See e-mobility sessions.
Running charging stations
When an Account operates stations on Road, its invoice covers the cost of running the infrastructure:
- subscription fees per charging station, from the billing plan,
- module costs, such as payment terminals, energy-management integration, or premium features, and
- settlement fees on payouts, including roaming-network fees for third-party e-mobility sessions and card-payment settlement fees for modes like tap-to-pay or scan-to-pay.
See charging sessions for the operator side of a charge.
Reimbursement
Earnings flow the other way, as a payout to a station owner. The sessions a station runs are priced at its tariff, collected into a credit invoice, and paid out. Where the money lands depends on the site's reimbursement policy, set on its Location:
- for public stations, earnings usually go to the Account that owns the station,
- for home-charging reimbursement, the user owns the station and their employer reimburses them for their sessions, per the configured policy.
Paying an invoice
Charges net out into a monthly invoice per Account. The Account's payment method decides how it is collected: automatic, where Road collects on the stored payment method, or manual, where the Account settles it itself.