MSP account organizations billed separately

[meraki-user]

If a customer has an MSP account, and makes Organizations for separate companies, Org1, Org2, etc., can they have it setup so that these companies are billed separately by Cisco Meraki for licenses, devices, etc.? Or does the single MSP account owner have to be the single billed entity?

[RWelch]

Licensing for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) - FAQ gives the impression that it's best have separate organizations for customers vs managing all customers under one single MSP wide organization.

The idea would be best for licensing/billing at the organization level.

As a MSP are you managing all customers under one organization or does each customer have their own separate organizations?

[meraki-user]

It is a company that has subcompanies, the same way GM has Chevrolet, Buick, etc. If GM had an MSP account, with multiple Orgs created in the GUI, would they be able to have the companies like Chevrolet and Buick be billed separately by Meraki for their own purchases, or would Meraki only be able to treat GM as a single customer?

[Mloraditch]

Every org would normally be on different billing. We are an MSP and our clients own their orgs and are billed separately. Some have Co-Term, some have EAs, some have PDL.  You can use Subscriptions across multiple orgs so in theory you could bill multiple orgs together but I would only do that for separate orgs for one parent company.

[meraki-user]

So if I keep to the hypothetical example of GM, suppose GM opens an MSP account, then goes in the GUI and creates a "Buick" organization. Then someone from Buick wants to buy 20 switches. At this point, Buick doesn't have an account. Do they need to create a separate account to make the purchase? And if so, would they have a separate (non-MSP) dashboard? Or can Buick make hardware purchases without having a dashboard account, and then have GM, via the MSP account, claim the devices into the Buick org's inventory?

[Mloraditch]

Accounts on the dashboard have almost zero relation to accounts for billing purposes. You don't need any dashboard account at all to actually order things. You do need one to claim things. So GM can buy 20 switches, Buick can buy 20 switches and you can bill it all to GM, you can bill it separately, they can all use the same org, they can use a different org. If you are using a subscription you can have multiple in the same org, but each network can only have one subscription. So you could have Business A, with Divisions B and C . Each Division has their own subscription and different sets of networks, but perhaps some shared needs require the single org.

You could also have Business A and Divisions B and C each have their own meraki org.

If you use co-term you will have to order the renewal all at once per org and the licenses are all shared. How you bill to customer is between you and them.

I suggest you perhaps have a discussion with a Meraki AM or a Cisco specialist at your Distributor where you can get into more detail than a public forum. There are a lot of possible combinations of operating modes here and your customer base may require that you deal with all of them. 

[PhilipDAth]

Let's clarify a few things.

There isn't really such a thing as an "MSP" account.  The term is used when your admin login has access to more than one Meraki Dashboard.  That's it.  It's a login concept.

There is an MSP branding system you can use - but that only relates to how things look.

https://documentation.meraki.com/General_Administration/Organizations_and_Networks/Dashboard_Brandin...

Because an MSP account is a "login concept", it does not affect billing in any way.

If your account can log into Org1, Org2 and Org3, then you have an "MSP account".  This does not change the requirement that each of those orgs still needs to be separately billed and licensed.

[meraki-user]

There are two types of Meraki dashboard accounts. Ones that have the MSP Portal feature, and ones that don't. The ones that do are the ones I'm referring to as MSP dashboard accounts. When you have this type of account, you can create organizations in the GUI and name them whatever you want. So if I'm Company ABC, and I have three divisions called ABC1 to ABC3, I can go into the GUI of my dashboard account and create those three orgs. Meraki only sees one dashboard customer named ABC. The other three orgs are just objects created in the GUI. 

The other members answered my question for me. Since ABC1 is just an object created in the GUI, Meraki doesn't see them as a customer. But now I know that ABC1 (the actual company and staff) can purchase Meraki devices without having a dashboard account. Then parent company ABC can use its dashboard account to claim the devices and add them to inventory, into the GUI org called ABC1. That is my understanding of the answers I received.

[PhilipDAth]

Every full Meraki dashboard administrator can create new orgs and name them whatever they want.  No special permissions are required to do this.

[BlakeRichardson]

Being an end user here I think it's very important that the company you are managing creates the Org and then invites the MSP to have access not the other way around. 

At the end of the day the customer owns the hardware and licensing and should be in full control of it. The customer might decide to change MSP or self manage and they should be able to do that without untangling a mess create by an MSP having created Orgs.