Marketplace offers billing
Appropriate roles: Billing admin
As a partner in the Cloud Solution Provider program (CSP), use Partner Center to purchase license-based SaaS products from Independent Software Vendor (ISV) publishers in the commercial marketplace. After you do so, you can access a bill for these types of purchases. The billing period starts on the first day of the calendar month and ends on the last day of the calendar month. Invoices are made available on the eighth day of the following month.
You can access invoices from either the Partner Center dashboard or by using Partner Center APIs.
Partners in the CSP program are billed for ISV commercial marketplace solutions purchased for a customer when they purchase those products from either Partner Center or from the Azure portal (using the customer's prior, CSP-purchased Azure tenant).
Note
If customers use their own Microsoft Entra tenant (not one purchased from a partner in the CSP program), customers can also choose to purchase their own ISV SaaS solution directly from (Microsoft AppSource or Azure Marketplace). If they do so, they'll receive their own bill directly from Microsoft. Likewise, if a partner in the CSP program sells an Azure subscription or the new Azure plan to the customer and grants the customer (or indirect reseller) role-based access to that tenant (assigning any role to the customer besides Reader), that customer (or indirect reseller) can also purchase commercial marketplace offers without prior approval or notification to the CSP partner. In these cases, Microsoft will not directly notify partners in the CSP program about purchases made by their customers. However, Microsoft does offer an optional Azure Monitor mechanism that you can use to set alerts or notifications about activity on an Azure subscription.
Access billing information for commercial marketplace products
The billing admin for your company receives an email when an invoice is ready to view. To access the latest invoice and reconciliation file for commercial marketplace product purchases:
Sign in to Partner Center and select the Billing workspace.
Go to the Billing history section.
At the top of the Billing page, the tabs Recurring let you access invoice and reconciliation files for different marketplace products:
These invoices and reconciliation files show subscriptions related to Office 365, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Entra ID, Power BI Pro, and Microsoft Azure.
To see earlier invoices and recon files, expand the Billing history row.
Go to the Billing overview (NCE) task menu > Billing | Billing Overview (NCE) page and choose the year > select the invoice number > find the reconciliation file on the side panel.
These invoices and reconciliation files show Azure plan, Azure reservations, software, and commercial marketplace products. If you purchased subscriptions for a customer in a different currency, select the appropriate currency to access those invoices and reconciliation files.
To access the invoices and reconciliation line items using API, see Partner Center APIs.
To check your bill at any time based on the latest account activity, select a link under the Reports card > Estimates.
Note
To ensure clarity, we include taxes, charges, and credits when posting your new commerce invoices on the eighth day of the month. This approach may change the final amount due to what you see during the billing period.
More about invoices and recon files for commercial marketplace products
This section offers more information about invoice and reconciliation files for commercial marketplace SaaS subscriptions purchased for customers from third-party ISV publishers.
When you select invoices from the Billing | Billing Overview (NCE) page in the Partner Center task menu, you gain access to invoices and reconciliation files for charges related to both Microsoft (first-party) and ISV (third-party) purchases. These purchases might be associated with:
SaaS subscriptions (from either Microsoft or ISV publishers)
Azure plan
Azure reservations
Azure savings plans
Other subscription-based software (from either Microsoft or ISV publishers)
Examples of these purchases might include SUSE Linux software (a software subscription) or an Azure ISV SaaS product subscription.
Note
For more information about how to read invoice and recon files, see also Billing overview.
Tips on reading your invoice
When you purchase a license-based SaaS product from a third-party ISV publisher, you see charges for the license fee on your invoice. The goal is to ensure transparency in billing. It's true even when the ISV's SaaS product uses underlying Azure infrastructure resources. Azure infrastructure usage charges for an ISV's SaaS product is billed directly to the ISV. ISVs see associated Azure consumption charges in their own Azure usage daily rated usage reconciliation file.
Your invoice contains several pages:
Page 1 of the invoice: Contains a summary overview of the CSP program partner's billing details. This page includes a summary of charges for the billing period, an invoice number, payment terms (Net 60 days), and billing payment methods to pay by wire or by check.
Page 2 (and any subsequent pages) of the invoice: Details charges for both first-party Microsoft purchases and third-party ISV (license-based) purchases from the commercial marketplace. You can identify ISV license-based purchases by the Publisher line beneath each product name. The associated reconciliation file offers more billing details for specific invoice charges.
Final page of the invoice: If you're charged for license-based marketplace products from an ISV, this final page gives more details about the ISV publisher's name and address.
Tips on reading your reconciliation file
The new commerce reconciliation file contains several columns with more details that map to the charges in your invoice. The PublisherName column shows whether the purchase is from Microsoft or a third-party ISV publisher.
Zero charges in your reconciliation line items might be due to an ISV "free trial" or a Bring Your Own License offer.
Free trial ISV offers:
The free trial period covers the cost of the ISV's license-based SaaS product during that time. You aren't charged for associated Azure infrastructure use of that SaaS product. If you're using a usage-based ISV offer, however, the free trial doesn't include the cost of underlying Azure infrastructure usage. In this case, Azure infrastructure usage charges appear in a separate Azure reconciliation file.
Purchasing and deploying an ISV's product eligible for a free trial enrolls the customer automatically in the trial by the ISV publisher. The free trial period ends automatically after the period defined by the ISV publisher. After the period ends, the customer is charged. The reconciliation file might show two rows for a trial-eligible product: one for the trial period and one for the paid offer.
For more information about what each column represents, see Use your reconciliation files. See also Types of billing in Partner Center.