Prior to September 2024, you could only calculate for a period of a year or the specified calculation period. Now you have additional options on the Amounts Per setting in a rule that can be used to calculate and pay out rebates in smaller intervals within a period of a year. This includes calculating and paying out in periods of quarters, months, or for a fiscal year.
Of the many variations of calculating rebates, a primary differentiator is the period of calculation and payout. This page explains how to calculate and pay or receive rebates in quarterly periods.
With the Quarterly option, you can choose when your year starts, in other words, when you want the quarters to start. Then you can calculate either from the rule validation date or a specified date from which your quarterly periods should begin.
Calculations are only allowed for 12 months, regardless of when your year starts.
With quarterly rebates:
The cumulative total resets to zero every quarter.
The quarters start at the specified start of the year unless the calculation period is different.
When the calculation period starts in the middle of a quarter, the cumulative total from the start of the quarter to the start of the calculation period is calculated and used as the starting point. Then the rebate is calculated until the end of that quarter, and following in a regular pattern with other quarters. Hence, in some cases, the results would have more than four quarterly periods.
When the calculation period starts outside the rule validation date, the calculation period is trimmed to the rule validation period. The quarters are calculated as above.
Example: Same rule, different quarterly year, same calculation date range
In this basic example, two calculations are run for the same rule, yielding different results. The same calculation date range is applied to each calculation. The calculation start date is the same as the rule start date. The only difference is the date on which the quarters start.
(A) Where the quarterly year starts on the rule date
In the rule setup Brackets section, select Amounts per > Quarter.
Select the On the rule start date option. This means the quarters start on the same date as the rule start, which in this example, is 1st January. The first quarter will be from January to March, the next will be from April to June, and so on. At the start of each quarter, the cumulative total will reset to zero.
Click Calculate, enter the transaction date range and click Calculate. In this example, you start on the same date as the rule and run for the whole calendar year (12 months).
In the results, you can see the brackets are applied to the quarters. At the start of each quarter, the total resets to zero. There are 12 bracket rows, 3 for each quarter.
(B) Where the quarterly year starts on a different date
In the rule setup Brackets section, select Amounts per > Quarter.
Select the Other option, then select the date. This option allows you to set a date different from the rule start, for example, 1st February. The first quarter will be from February to April, the next from May to July, and so on. At the start of each quarter, the cumulative total will reset to zero.
Click Calculate, enter the transaction date range and click Calculate. Just like in example (A) above, you start on the same date as the rule and run for the whole calendar year (12 months). However, in this example, the quarters start on a different date (1st February), so some of the transactions (1st to 31st January) will fall outside the range of the quarterly year.
In the results, you can see the brackets are applied to the month of January and reset to zero for the start of the first quarter on 1st February. From there, the quarters are calculated as usual, resetting the total to zero each time. There are 15 bracket rows: the first 3 rows are for the month of January, and then there’s 3 rows for each quarter.
