MDQ — Segment Pricing

A subscription sold over a term isn’t priced once — it’s priced per segment (year, quarter, or month). MDQ (multi-dimensional quoting) runs the waterfall for each segment, then ramps the price across them according to the product’s dimension.

Per-segment uplift

Each segment starts from the base unit price and applies the dimension’s uplift:

  • Percent uplift — compound. Each segment is that percentage more than the previous one (year 2 = year 1 × 1.05, year 3 = year 2 × 1.05, …). The increase builds down the ramp.
  • Amount uplift — linear. Each segment adds a flat amount over the base (base, base + X, base + 2X, …). The amount is in the dimension’s currency and is never auto-converted.

The result is a per-segment unit price — what the customer pays per unit in that year.

Proration — a partial segment bills its actual share

Terms don’t always divide evenly into whole segments (a 30-month deal on a Year dimension is 2½ years), and a segment can also be cut short mid-term: a co-term date truncates the last one, and amending a contract splits the segment the amendment lands in. Whenever a segment covers only part of its dimension’s cycle, MDQ prorates it — the segment’s billable quantity is scaled by the share of the period it actually covers, so the customer is charged proportionally.

With the default Daily proration, Pinion counts that share in whole calendar months first. Each complete month is exactly one month of the period (1/12 of a year, 1/3 of a quarter), however many days it has, and only a genuinely partial month prorates by its days, against that month’s own length. A complete period is always exactly 1, so 14 months on a Year dimension bills 14 ÷ 12 = 1.17 years, and a whole year bills 1 whether or not it contains February 29. Your admin can choose a coarser proration per product; see Proration.

Under Weekly proration, a complete period still bills exactly 1, but a partial period bills only its completed whole weeks; any leftover days are dropped. The weeks are counted against that period’s real length. For example, the first 192 days of a 365-day year are 27 completed weeks, so they bill 27 ÷ (365 ÷ 7) = 0.5178 of the year, where Daily would bill 0.5242. When an amendment splits a Weekly segment, each part drops its own leftover days, so the two parts together can bill slightly less than the whole year.

Under Daily, proration holds all the way down, with no minimum billable period. A segment covering one day of a Year dimension bills one day, not a whole year: one day of a 31-day month is 1 ÷ 31 of a month, so 1 ÷ 372 ≈ 0.0027 of the year. This matters most on amendments: amend a contract a day after it starts and the one-day sliver left in front of the amendment date is charged as a day.

Quarterly proration is different: it is a floor that counts only completed months. Under Quarterly, a part of a split segment shorter than one completed month bills nothing, so the amendment shows no line for it. Today the amendment split uses your org’s Default Proration Type, not a Proration Type set on the product, so this applies when your admin has made Quarterly the org default. Amend a contract under Quarterly three days into a year and the amendment has no line for those three days: that year’s segment starts on the amendment date and bills its completed months from there. Amend it three days before a year ends and the year’s segment stops the day before the amendment date. A co-term date works the same way on a new quote, and there the product’s own Proration Type applies (a blank one falls back to the org default): if it cuts a Quarterly product’s last segment to less than one completed month, that short segment bills nothing, so the grid shows no column for it and the product ends with the last whole segment before it. A co-term date 21 days into a Quarterly product’s third year leaves two Year segments and no third. A co-term date you set on a single product line behaves the same way as the opportunity’s co-term date. This is expected, not a missing line. See Proration.

Fractional quantities are real — and are shown to four decimals

Because of proration a segment’s billable quantity is routinely not a whole number, so Pinion shows it at the precision it is actually billed at: up to four decimal places, with trailing zeros trimmed.

Billable quantityShown as
A whole 33
1.531.53
Quantity 10 over a third of a quarter3.3333
Quantity 3 over one day (of a 31-day month) of a year0.0081

A 0.3333 or 0.0081 in a quantity column is correct proration, not a display glitch. It is the same number the line is priced on — quantity × unit price still reconciles, to the cent, with that segment’s total, which is exactly why it isn’t rounded away. Rounding it to a whole number (or to 0) would leave a line charging real money beside a quantity that couldn’t account for it.

The same value, formatted the same way, appears on every surface that shows a billable quantity: the segment’s Price Waterfall, the per-segment rows on the record’s Product Display (Products and Configuration Options tabs), and the Quantity column of the generated quote document. What you type per segment in the configurator grid is still the plain full-period quantity — proration is applied to it, and the prorated result is what those surfaces show.

Discount aggregation

A dimension’s Discount Aggregation setting decides how segment quantities earn a volume discount:

  • Across Segments (default) — every segment’s quantity sums to one total that picks one tier for the whole ramp (a ramp is one commitment).
  • Per-Segment — each segment’s own quantity picks its own tier.

However the tier is picked, it applies first. A segment’s own Additional Discount then comes off the post-tier price. That is the same order every other line uses (see Discounts & Promos). The discounted unit price is rounded to the cent before it is multiplied by the segment’s quantity. For example, a segment on a $1,100 ramp price that earns a 10% tier and carries its own 10% discount is priced at $891.00 ($1,100 → $990.00 → $891.00).

The tier comes from the product’s discount schedule, so every segment inside the schedule’s dates earns it, including Year 1. Reopening a saved line and saving it again keeps the tier, and the segment’s price breakdown shows it as a discount-schedule step. A segment price only stops following the schedule when you type a new price into that segment’s Unit Price cell; tabbing through the cell without typing leaves it alone.

What activates

Only Year / Quarter / Month dimensions activate into segments (and, on close-won, into per-segment subscription records). Custom and One-Time dimensions don’t segment — see Dimensions.