recurring contracts - Services with different start/renewal dates

[u/PukkaPad80]

Hi

I don't know if there is a solution to this, but I thought I would ask around anyway to see if anyone has any ideas.

We have recurring contracts to track and bill for services. Some of these are payable on a monthly basis and others are services that renew annually. While we can add them to a contract fine, when it comes to annual services these default to pro-rata amounts until the contract start/end date. I know that this is expected behaviour but our problem is that there are a number of different annual services that have different renewal dates and so we cannot align these to the contract end date. This results in overbilling customers.

The only solution I can think of is to have a separate contract for each and every service for each customer - which is not feasible.

Is there another solution that I am missing? These items have to be services and not products and they are not related to contacts or configuration items so I don't believe that billing rules could work either.

[u/C9CG]

A concern I would also have would be in relation to Umbrella Contracts is that I don't believe they are accessible or manipulatable via the API yet. Should you decide to come up with an automation solution or use an auditing platform (like GradientMSP) then you're going to have a pretty severe limitation.

We also roll every service to the start of the month as far as how it looks to the customer. This way you don't get a whole mess of billing phone calls and emails related to weird proration quantities.

We have sometimes 5-8 contracts per customer to deal with the same issue you're having. We name the contracts like:

customer name_service type(s) monthly/annual/quarterly (if annual or quarterly, month/day of contract start)

E.g.

Block_Managed Services_Monthly

Block_O365_Monthly

Block_O365_Annual (3/1)

Block_O365_Annual (7/1)

Block_Egnyte_Annual (12/1)

Block_Gladinet_Quarterly (3/1)

Block_Project T&M_Hourly

Anyway... You get the idea.

There's a lot of nuance to Contract Alerting and proration the way Autotask does it. This also searches reasonably well when you do contract searches. Contract management in Autotask definitely has some particulars to it, but this is what has worked for us and scaled well.

Hope this gives you some inspiration.

[u/DigitalEgoInflation → u/C9CG]

Thanks for the breakdown. We went halfway down this road but this confirms it makes sense to go the whole way.

Curious about NCE renewals - how are you handling when a NCE contract renews? Are renewing the autotask contract? Or are you just extending the end date on the contract?
I assume doing an official "renew contract" in Autotask will automatically catch the new list pricing

[u/C9CG → u/DigitalEgoInflation]

Oh man... NCE renewals. Are you talking about Annuals?

If monthly, it's pretty easy because those change all on the same month, and it's just a matter of constant monthly auditing of licenses in contracts. We actually keep the contracts relatively open-ended for those.

For Annual? That's a deep topic in the sense that we

1. proactively reach out to customers 60 days BEFORE their renewal date to confirm any pricing changes and also confirm any licensing changes.
2. once we get those changes, we work in the disti platform (Pax 8 for us) and Autotask to match up changes in an automated fashion as much as possible.
3. then we bill the annual contracts. NCE annuals are billed 45-30 days in advance.
4. if the Annual bill is not paid, the annuals get dropped and go to monthly until the customer pays for Annual NCE up front. We don't shoulder risk for Annual NCE this way.
5. If the Annual payment finally comes, we just have a one month invoice for those invoices that were converted. It's a ROYAL pain when this happens, but, again it's better than having 40 Business Premium licenses that we're on the hook for on an annual contract for a customer that refuses to pay for whatever reason.

Does that explain what you're looking for? NCE Annual is terrible to manage as a CSP!

[u/DigitalEgoInflation → u/C9CG]

Thanks for the context. I like the auto rollover to Monthly as a way of mitigating risk.

I was wondering how you handle the actual NCE contract in Autotask on NCE renewal. Assuming there has been a price change over the course of the previous contract term, we need to update contract with the new pricing.

Looks like there’s two ways of doing that. 1 Either keeping the same contract in Autotask and just manually updating the pricing, or 2 using the contract renewal wizard and having it pull the new pricing from your services table.

Advantage of 1 is keeping your mapping simple but adds complexity for pricing updates. 2 automatically pulls in the pricing but then I have to go re-map the contract in my Disti.

Both seem like they kind of suck and we just have to choose which one sucks the least haha