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.

That holds all the way down, with no minimum billable period. A segment covering one day of a Year dimension bills one day — about 0.0027 of the period — not a whole 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.

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 year0.0082

A 0.3333 or 0.0082 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.

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.