Use Case: Advancing the Contract Dates of Evergreen Products

When you request to advance the term of an evergreen product using the Change endpoint, Billing modifies the fields on the activated billing header and modifies the billing schedule records (BSRs) per the change request or displays an error message.

While doing the amendment, the value in the Billable Amount for Current Order Line Item field must be strictly USD 0.00, and the selling term must remain the same as the previous sale.

The evergreen services have an auto-renewal functionality, by which new BSRs are automatically created as and when the existing BSRs are invoiced. For more information on billing of Evergreen products or services, refer to Billing Evergreen Products.

During an amendment, if there are more BSRs than required, the billing application cancels or refunds the renewal BSRs created before the amendment. The canceled BSRs are eventually re-created as the evergreen contract progresses. 

If an amendment is done to cancel the Evergreen subscription, the billing application cancels or refunds the renewal BSRs created before the amendment. No BSRs are re-created if the contract is canceled.

For example, a new sale is initiated for an evergreen service with a TCV (Sales) of USD 1,200.00. The billing frequency is quarterly. The start date is 01-July-2024 and the end date is 30-June-2025. Initiating the billing generates four billing schedule records (BSRs). Evergreen Billing Schedule Records Creation Option is set to Ahead of Time and the auto-renewal term is set to 4 (four).

New Sale

The data of the four BSRs and BSDs are shown in the table:

Auto-renewal

Assume that the first two BSRs are invoiced, which is why two more BSRs are created due to the auto-renewal out-of-the-box functionality. The billing header's TCV (Sales) field is updated to USD 1,800.00.

The billing header has the following data:

The data of the four BSRs and BSDs are shown in the table:

After amendment

The subscription is amended to advance the contract term by three months so the start and end dates of the contract are now 01-April-2024 and 31-March-2025 respectively. To accommodate this request, the billing application performs the following tasks:

• Cancels the renewal BSRs, BSR-5, and BSR-6. This temporarily resets the value of the Billable Amount for the Current OLI field to USD 0.00 (eventually it is updated to USD 300.00 once the new BSR after the amendment is created). 
• Since the contract period is advanced by one quarter, the billing application truncates a quarter (BSR-4 here) from the end of the contract.  This makes the selling term equal to the previous selling term.

The billing header after the amendment is updated with the new dates and the new TCV (Sales) as shown:

The BSRs are generated differently, based on the setting Superseding the Schedules during Asset Management is set to Always Supersede or Minimize, as shown below:

When the setting "Superseding the Schedules during Asset Management" is set to Always Supersede.

The BSRs and BSDs are:

When the setting "Superseding the Schedules during Asset Management" is set to Minimize.

The BSRs are:

The BSDs are: