> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.hologram.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# How to interpret billing transactions
Billing transactions are available in the **Billing** section of your dashboard.
**Important:** The **Statements** page has been deprecated. Detailed transaction history is now available on the **Transactions** page and can be downloaded as an XLSX or CSV file.
Hologram's Transactions page provies a granular, historical view of every billing transaction that occurred for your organization and devices. If you have questions about your invoice, or want to analyze the underlying data, transaction history is the best place to look.
Downloading transactions allows you to easily manipulate and analyze billing transaction data in a format that is familiar and accessible to most finance and operations teams — a spreadsheet. The default download format is an `XLSX` file with each transaction split into its own row, but you can download transactions into `CSV` formats using the three-dot menu on the report table. These exports let you create more detailed pivot tables and summarizations to analyze and aggregate the data in the way that makes most sense for your business operations.
## How can I access billing transactions?
Billing transactions can be found under the **Transactions** page of the **Billing** section of your dashboard.
This page has two tabs. The **Transaction** tab lists out all transactions for your organization and devices.
Once you navigate to the **Transactions** page, you will see a list of historical transactions that have been generated for your organization, filterable by billing period. The earliest transactions are available back to April 2020, to retrieve earlier transactions, please contact us at [support@hologram.io](mailto:support@hologram.io).
The **Balance history** tab lists out your organization's balance history per calendar month (UTC), and links to the filtered view of transactions for that month. For organizations with monthly invoicing (postpaid billing), the monthly totals here match your monthly invoice totals.
Both pages display three totals:
* **Charges** — This is a running total of all of the charges accrued during the billing period.
* **Credits and adjustments** — If any balance was added to your account or adjusted throughout the month, you will see the total here.
* **Total charges** — The total outstanding amount after accounting for charges and balance added throughout the month.
Any charges are listed as negative transactions, and any balance additions or credits are positive transactions.
## What should I expect to see in my billing transactions?
The transactions report contains one row for every transaction that occurred throughout the previous month. A transaction — and therefore each row — represents a billing event such as an SMS message, a SIM's monthly recurring charge, single or aggregated data usage for data session(s), monthly recurring charges for new SIM activations, data plan changes, and any other charge types.
### Charge types and explanations
| Charge type | Description |
| ----------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| MRC | The **monthly recurring charge** per SIM. This charge includes prepaid data for Included data plans. |
| Data usage | Charge for **data usage** that is not included with any plan. This includes pay as you go or overage data usage. |
| Outbound SMS | Charge for each **outbound SMS message** sent from a device. |
| Activation | **Monthly recurring charges for new SIM activations** on a data plan. Per SIM monthly recurring charges are charged at the beginning of each billing cycle. This only applies for the first month in which a SIM is activated in subsequent months, the charge will be included as a SIM Renewal charge type. |
| Bulk activation | Initial monthly recurring charges when bulk activating many SIMs on a data plan at once. |
| Plan change | Charges to adjust for mid-month data plan changes. |
| Phone number activation | First month's charge for activating a new phone number. |
| Phone number renewal | Monthly recurring charge for renewing a phone number. |
| Zero-data discount | Credit for SIMs on contracted plans that used 0 B of data in their current billing period. Contracted accounts only. |
| APN service fee | Charge for custom APN services. Contracted accounts only. |
| Overbilling correction | Corrects transactions that were overcharged for. |
| Credit | Account credit adjustments. |
### Field names and descriptions
Each transaction contains the following columns described below. In some cases, some of the columns may be blank if data for that column is not applicable or not available.
#### Transaction columns
| Column name | Description |
| ---------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Transaction ID | Unique ID for the transaction. This is helpful in case you have a question and want to ask the Hologram support team about a certain transaction, you can use this Transaction ID as a reference. |
| Transaction type | Represents the type of charge for the given transaction. See the table above for each type and its description. |
| Transaction time (UTC) | Date and time that the transaction occurred in UTC. Note: this is not the precise time of a data session or usage charge. The timestamp refers to the time the transaction took place, not the timing of any usage-based event. |
| Transaction amount | The amount of the charge for the transaction. |
| Bytes | The number of bytes billed in data usage transactions. To connvert from bytes to MB, divide by 1,000,000. |
| Profile ICCID | The unique identifier of the profile that was billed for the transaction. If a transaction affects multiple SIMs, this field will be empty. |
| SIM ID | The unique identifier of the SIM card that the transaction references, if applicable. |
| Device ID | The unique identifier of the device that the transaction references, if applicable. |
| Profile (Link) ID | The unique identifier of the profile that the transaction references, if applicable. |
#### Additional columns for organizations with network-level billing or custom billing
| Column name | Description |
| ------------------ | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Rate | The rate used for the transaction. |
| Quantity | The number of units billed for the transaction (e.g. the number of MB used in a session). |
| Units | The type of units billed for the transaction (e.g MB, SMS). |
| UNC | The "Universal Network Code" for the network that the transaction occurred on, used to identify network rates. |
| Charge | The name of the network that the transaction occurred on. |
| Amount | The amount of the transaction. |
| TADIG | The TADIG for the transaction. |
| Country ISO3 | The country ISO3 for the transaction. |
| Network name | The name of the network for the transaction. |
| Plan ID | The ID of the data plan the transaction was billed against, if applicable. |
| Plan Name | The name of the data plan the transaction was billed against, if applicable. |
| Included data (MB) | The amount of data included in the data plan for the transaction, used to identify data overage. |
## What is not included in billing transactions?
* Any **data included in a data plan** is prepaid and included within the SIM's MRC. That amount is not charged as a separate transaction. However, any overage data above that amount would appear as a "data overage" charge.
* **Data usage transactions are not session-level.** In complex deployments, session-level charges create an overwhelmingly large number of transactions. To handle this, Hologram aggregates data usage charges per SIM to a minimum charge amount of \$0.25. For contracted billing solutions, transactions are instead aggregated per SIM and network per month using a Universal Network Code (UNC).
* Billing adjustments made directly to an invoice are not reflected in transaction or balance history.
## FAQs
Hologram's transaction data is meant to be manipulated in a spreadsheet application such as Excel or Google Sheets. We recommend exporting the data, then creating a Pivot table to view the data so that you can get a summarized or aggregated view.
No, transactions **only track data usage that incurred a charge** during the month.
Some SIMs may be on plans that include data as part of the monthly recurring charge. Data usage for these SIMs would generate a unique transaction, unless the SIM usage exceeded the amount of data included in the plan and was charged **overage**. If no overage was charged, no additional transaction record is created for the SIM. If the SIM exceeded the allotted plan amount during the month, that usage (the number of bytes and the cost) would appear as a transaction. To get a full view of all SIM usage, we recommend using [data usage reports](/dashboard/usage/usage-active-sims).
SIMs can also generate only zero-byte sessions, often due to device configuration issues, in which case no transactions would be generated for that SIM.
No. We do not recommend using transactions to analyze data usage. Not all usage will appear in transactions. Any data usage that is included with a plan is not charged as a transaction, and would not be included. If you want to get a view of all data usage, we recommend using our session-level [data usage reports](/dashboard/usage/usage-active-sims).
Some networks do not provide IMEIs for every data session. Some networks do not provide IMEI consistently between sessions. We provide the IMEI for all sessions and transactions where it is provided to us.
In most cases, this number will be 1 which represents a single SIM. However, for certain charge types - such as for a Bulk Data Plan - many SIMs are activated at once, so this field would reflect the number of SIMs included in a given transactions.
Negative transactions represent a **charge** to your account. Any balance additions or adjustments will be positive transactions.
The transaction data provided is meant to be manipulated in a spreadsheet application like Excel or Google Sheets. We recommend creating a Pivot table to view the data so that you can get a summarized or aggregated view.
For most customers, no. Transactions group data sessions by at least \$0.25 increments per SIM. So if a SIM had many very small data sessions — and the sum cost for all of them totaled less than \$0.25 — they would be processed in a transaction until the \$0.25 threshold was reached. Some \$0.25 transactions may represent 1 data session or it may represent many data sessions. The transactions report only provides a view into billing transactions of at least \$0.25. Detailed [data usage reporting](/dashboard/usage/usage-active-sims) is found in the Usage section of your dashboard.
For contracted accounts with network-level billing or custom billing solutions, however, transactions are provided for each data session. Each session-level transaction includes the Universal Network Code (UNC) for the network that the session occurred on, the network name, TADIG, and country ISO3 code for the session.
The **invoice** itself shows a summarized total, not a per-SIM line-item list. To break charges down by SIM, use the **transactions** export instead: transaction records include the SIM's ICCID, so you can filter or pivot by SIM in a spreadsheet. Hologram does not provide session-level transaction data.
For most organizations, data usage transactions are aggregated per SIM to a minimum \$0.25 threshold, so a per-SIM total in transactions reflects billed charges but not every individual session.
Contracted accounts with network-level billing receive transactions are summarized per SIM profile per network per month. These charges include a Universal Network Code (UNC), network, and TADIG/MNC/MCC. If you receive standard billing and need a per-network summary of transactions, [contact Support](/guides/get-started/contact-support) or ask your account team about [network-level billing](/guides/billing/network-level-billing-overview). For session-level usage (not billing) by SIM, use the [data usage reports](/dashboard/usage/usage-active-sims).
Our billing system waits until there is a charge of at least \$0.25 when creating a new transaction. This means that we do not create a transaction row for every single session a device has. Some transactions may be a single session, and others could be any number of sessions aggregated together once the total cost for those sessions is equal to or exceeds \$0.25. Transactions should not be used to count the number or timing of data usage sessions.
If you have monthly invoicing, transactions may close at the end of the month before aggregating up to \$0.25 so that they are included in the monthly invoice.
To view data in aggregate by day, insert 2 blank columns next to the Timestamp column. Add a `SPLIT` function to the first new column using a space as the delimiter. The formula looks like this in Google Sheets: `=SPLIT(B2," ",FALSE,FALSE)`
XLSX files will not truncate long numbers. However, when importing transactions CSVs, applications like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets will truncate the 18 to 22 digit ICCID into scientific notation. To prevent this from happening, format the ICCID column as 'Text' when importing the data into your spreadsheet tool.