Business Flex is retiring: what changes for your fleet

Business Flex is being retired. If you run a fleet of Vodafone services, the useful question is not what the new range is called — it is what behaves differently the next time you add a service, renew one, or hand a new starter a phone.

Business First is the range we sell now. Structurally it will feel familiar: a plan per service, one bill, and an account manager who knows the account. Underneath, three things work differently enough to change how you should size and structure a fleet.

One thing before the detail: Flex has not disappeared overnight. There is a short window in which we can still complete a Flex arrangement, so if you are part way through a decision, talk to us before assuming the door has closed.

If you are on Business Flex today

A new range launching does not rewrite an agreement you have already signed. Your existing services keep running on the terms they were sold on.

What changes is everything from here. New connections and renewals go onto Business First, which for most businesses means a mixed fleet for a while — some services on the old range, some on the new. That mix matters more than it used to, because the biggest difference in Business First is about what your services share with each other.

Exactly when each of your existing services moves across depends on where it sits in its own term, and that is not something to work out from a web page. Ask us for a service-by-service list of your account with the term end date against each one. It takes us a few minutes and it is the only version of this answer that is actually about your business.

Data is pooled across the account, and the pool is what you are buying

Max speed data from every eligible service on the same billing account goes into one shared pool — voice plans, Tech Fund plans and mobile broadband together. It is consumed first in, first served, and the entire pool is used before any service is slowed.

The practical consequence is that sizing plans person by person stops making sense. In most fleets a handful of people use the great majority of the data and everyone else barely registers. Buying each person an allowance that covers their worst month means buying the same headroom dozens of times over. Pooling buys it once.

Two limits are worth knowing before you plan around it. Pooling happens within a billing account, so services scattered across separate accounts do not share with each other — consolidating is usually the first thing worth fixing. And unlimited inclusions sit outside the pool: unlimited international minutes belong to the service that has them and cannot be spread across the fleet. Counted international minutes do pool.

In Australia, running out of data is not a charge

This is the change most existing customers notice first. On Business First there is no excess data charge in Australia. When the pool is used up, services drop to a reduced speed — up to 2Mbps — until the next billing period.

That removes bill shock, which is genuinely good news for anyone who has had to explain an unexpected month to a finance team. But it swaps one problem for another. 2Mbps is fine for email, calls, maps and card terminals, and it is not fine for uploading site photos, video calls or anything large. So the failure mode is now a slow month rather than an expensive one, and it is worth watching the pool rather than assuming it manages itself. Boosters exist for the month where a project blows through it.

The exception is roaming. Data used overseas on $5 Roaming sits outside all of this and is charged, so international travel is still the part of the bill that deserves attention before a trip rather than after it.

Three ways to buy a service, not one

Business First splits into Voice, Tech Fund and Mobile Broadband, and picking the wrong one is the most common avoidable mistake.

Voice is the standard business plan — calls, texts and pooled data — on a 24 or 36 month term.

Tech Fund is the same thing with device funding built into the term. If you are refreshing handsets, this is the mechanism that pays for them; there is no separate device payment plan sitting alongside a contracted voice plan.

Mobile Broadband is data only. It has no calls and no SMS beyond emergency and whitelisted numbers, which makes it right for tablets, routers, cameras and card terminals and wrong for anything a human needs to answer. It can also stay month to month, and the smallest mobile broadband plan is designed to draw on a pool rather than stand alone, so it needs another shareable-data service on the same account.

If you are not sure which services in your fleet are on the wrong one of those three, that is a five-minute audit for us and a long afternoon for you.

What to sort out before your next connection

Four things, in the order they save the most trouble:

Get everything onto one billing account. Nothing else on this page works properly until that is true.

Pull three months of real usage, not an estimate. The number you need is what the whole fleet consumed together, not what any individual did.

Decide which services never need to make a call. Every one of those is a candidate for mobile broadband instead of voice.

Read the Critical Information Summary for the plan you are actually being sold. Where a briefing note, a rate card or a sales slide disagrees with the CIS, the CIS is the document that counts.

Getting the specifics for your account

We price on the size of your fleet rather than off a rate card, so the number that matters is the one we quote you against your actual service count. Tell us how many services you run and what they are for, and we will come back with it — along with the list of which of your services are on Flex, which term each one is in, and what we would do with them.

If you would rather start with a self-assessment, our free business connectivity health check takes about three minutes and scores how your setup is holding up.

VBC Hub has been trading since 2012 and is Vodafone’s largest business centre in Australia. The person who prices your account is the person who manages it afterwards.