Subscription Changes Postponed Until Renewal

When making changes to a subscription, a user can decide whether to apply the changes immediately or postpone them until the next auto-renewal date. This section explains what happens in CloudBlue Commerce when you schedule subscription changes and when they apply. You can only schedule the following changes: resource limit update, switch to another subscription period, switch to another plan, or co-term a subscription.

Important: Scheduling changes must be supported on the product and the vendor side. It is not supported for products fulfilled internally.

We recommend that you enable the following BSS features to improve scheduled orders work:

• FEA_ScheduledOrdersPostPaid. If enabled, customers will be charged for scheduled changes after provisioning.

• FEA_UseScheduledOrderAsRenewal. If enabled, the change order will replace the renewal order and all charges will be processed within a single order.

This is what happens when you or your customers make changes to a subscription and choose to postpone them till its next auto-renewal:

1. When such a change order is created for the subscription, it needs to be paid for before like a regular change order despite the changes will come into the effect later.

2. After the order is paid, provisioning starts with informing fulfillment system about the required changes, so that the service vendor could plan these changes ahead.

3. If this communication is successful, the order status changes to Scheduled.

4. Before the renewal date, a renewal order is created for the subscription. This order does not reflect the postponed changes.
   

   Note: A renewal order is not created if the FEA_UseScheduledOrderAsRenewal feature is enabled.

5. On the subscription expiration date, CloudBlue Commerce verifies that the requested changes were applied and obtains the actual provisioning date of these changes.
   

   Important: If the FEA_ScheduledOrdersPostPaid and FEA_UseScheduledOrderAsRenewal BSS features are disabled, the order with postponed changes can be processed after the renewal order and the customer can be billed twice for the same subscription: once for next billing period without changes applied, and then for the same period with the applied changes. If this happens, the customer's balance will be adjusted for the extra charged amount.
   

You can enable or disable the ability to place scheduled changes per plan in UX1. You can do this by updating the configuration file and reimporting it in PLM, or using the control panel.

To do this using the control panel, complete the steps below.

1. In UX1 go to Portfolio.

2. Switch to the Plans tab.

3. Click on a plan you wish to manage and go to Policies tab.

4. Click Manage in the Scheduled changes tile.

5. Enable or disable this functionality for this plan and click Apply.