Vulog Oddities

This documentation article is intended to house all the bits and pieces of knowledge about Vulog, so that they can be more easily referenced at a later date without relying on colleagues memories and old Trello cards to piece these things together.

Billing

Configuration

Note

Vulog is making some changes to the pricing system that should allow us to change pricing directly without their help in the near future.

Price configuration is handled on a per-vehicle, per-service, and per-mobility plan basis. Because of this complexity, it's a good idea to involve Vulog early on, leaving appropriate time for extensive testing, before we plan for a pricing change to go live.

Rounding

Time

There is no fractional billing for per-minute rates. A fractional minute will always round up to the nearest full minute. For example: a trip that lasts for 11 minute and 5 seconds will be billed as 12 minutes.

Hours and days are not subject to the same rounding function, instead the billing algorithm will charge members what combination of units will get them the lowest price. For example, a trip that is lasts for 1 hour and 50 minutes will round to the cheaper of the following:

$$\text{tripCost} = \min \left\{ \begin{array}{l} (1 \,\text{hour} \times \mathit{hourRate}) + (50 \,\text{minutes} \times \mathit{minuteRate}), \\ (2 \,\text{hours} \times \mathit{hourRate}) \end{array} \right.$$

Distance

For the purpose of overmileage, Vulog's billing system rounds distance down to the nearest whole unit.

For example, a trip that drives 10.9 miles over the allowed mileage would be charged for 10 additional miles, not 10.9 or 11.

Likewise, overmilage works based on full days. If a member pays for 3 days of driving, even if the trip took less than 3 days, they'd receive the amount of allowed mileage for 3 days. If they only pay for 1 day and some hours, they only get 1 days worth of distance included.

Taxes

Taxes are charged based on the tax zone that has been configured over area where the trip has started. This is true for both free-floating and scheduled-booking services. Technically speaking, this tax zone system overrides the configured service tax rate. In the absence of a tax zone (should never happen outside of very rare occurances, like restarting a stuck trip outside of the service area), the trip will be billed at the configured tax rate for the entire service - the same tax rates at which products are billed (currently, Saint Paul).

Tax zone rates can not be reconfigured directly from in Back Office. The naming of the tax zone is not linked to the rate that is actually charged. Open a ticket with Vulog to adjust tax rates. The area covered by a specific tax zone can be adjusted without Vulog's intervention.

Warning

Don't change the tax zones without extreme caution and care. We're working on reconfiguring tax zones so that they accurately allign with the geographic boundaries of the municipialities that may be levying these taxes.

Credits

Credits in a member's wallet are treated as any normal payment method. Subtracting any available, applicable credits from the invoice total is the last step before an invoice is sent to Stripe for payment processing.