Billing groups: allocate SIM costs by customer, project, or department

A billing group answers one question: who pays for this SIM? Assign SIMs to a group and every charge they generate from that point on is counted toward it, so you can see exactly what a customer, a project, or a department costs you without exporting the whole fleet into a spreadsheet.

Billing groups also work as a filter and as a way to scope bulk actions, so the same grouping you use for cost reporting is the one you use day to day.

What a billing group covers

Everything a SIM costs. Data, SMS, the daily fee per enabled SIM, the Green profile subscription, and any other SIM-related charge is attributed to the group that SIM belongs to. The totals appear on the Cost Overview page under Billing, and can be exported as Excel or CSV.

Billing groups are available on every account at no extra cost.

Billing groups are not tags

They look similar in the dashboard and they solve different problems.

Tags answer "what is this SIM for?" They're flexible labels for organising a fleet, and a SIM can carry as many as you want. See Tags.

Billing groups answer "who pays for this SIM?" A SIM belongs to exactly one billing group at a time.

One SIM, one groupThe single-group rule is deliberate. If a SIM could sit in two groups, its costs would be counted twice and your group totals would stop matching your actual spend. Because every charge is allocated exactly once, the Cost Overview always reconciles.

Allocation starts when the SIM joins the group

Cost allocation is not retroactive. Each charge is recorded against the group the SIM belonged to at the moment the cost was incurred.

If you move a SIM to a different group mid-month, past costs stay with the old group and new costs follow the SIM. That keeps the audit trail clean, and it means a group you create today starts from zero rather than backfilling history.

Create a billing group and assign SIMs

Sign in to dashboard.simbase.com and open SIM cards
Select the SIMs you want to group, using the checkboxes
In the action bar, choose the billing group action
Pick an existing group, or create a new one and name it after the customer, project, or department it represents
Apply

The group appears in the Billing groups column in the SIM list, so you can see at a glance which SIMs are allocated and which aren't.

Filter by billing group

The SIM cards page has a Billing groups filter alongside State, Coverage, Tags, and Network. Select a group to narrow the list to that group's SIMs.

This is the starting point for most bulk work: filter to a group, select all, then act on the whole set at once.

Bulk actions scoped by group

Once the list is filtered, the usual bulk actions apply to the selection:

Enable or disable every SIM in a group, for example when a customer contract starts or ends. See SIM state
Change the coverage plan across a group. See Coverage
Add a group's SIMs to a private network
Send an SMS to every SIM in the group. See SMS

See what each group costs

Open Billing → Cost Overview in the dashboard.
Review the per-group breakdown for the period you're interested in.
Export to Excel or CSV for your accounting workflow or for invoicing your own customers.

When to use billing groups

Rebilling your own customers

If you resell Simbase connectivity as part of a product, the per-group export is the basis for your own invoicing. Create a group per end customer, and each month you have a figure you can bill against rather than an estimate. This is the most common reason customers ask for the feature.

Splitting cost across business units

Finance teams that allocate connectivity internally can create a group per department or cost centre. Instead of one connectivity line on a company invoice, each unit sees what it actually consumed, and the numbers add up to the total.

Tracking spend per project or deployment

A group per project shows what connectivity contributes to that project's running costs, which matters when a deployment has its own budget or its own profitability target.

Keeping pilots out of production numbers

Trials and proof-of-concept fleets distort production budgets if they sit in the same pot. A separate group for pilot SIMs keeps evaluation spend visible and separate, and makes it easy to disable the whole pilot in one action when it ends.

Separating legal entities or regions

If subsidiaries or regional offices are billed separately, a group per entity produces the split without maintaining a parallel spreadsheet.

Costing a contract before renewal

Grouping by contract rather than by customer shows what a specific agreement costs to serve. That's the number you want in front of you when the renewal price is being set.