Managing the Annual Products

The annual products are not new SKUs, they are the existing Microsoft plans with the annual billing option enabled. So, there is no need for executing any special process for activating them in your BSS.

Updating your Catalogue for Annual Products

Enabling the Annual Billing Cycle to Certain Microsoft Products

When you perform the automatic update of the Microsoft products by running the "Get Services Definition" action, our system gets the available billing frequencies for each plan and activates the annual billing cycle if the plan supports it. The Catalog Status for the products that the annual billing cycle has been activated, is set to updated.

Updating the Annual Prices

The annual prices are updated automatically when you run the "Update Product Prices" tool. You need to run the tool only once for the monthly billing cycle but for the Microsoft products that have the annual billing cycle enabled, we will apply also as annual price the monthly price times 12.

Updating your Pricelists to include the Annual Products

The indirect CSPs that are working price lists must add in these price lists pricing rules for the annual billing cycle. 

If you are working with price groups in your price lists, then you need to add a pricing rule per price group in each price list.

If you are working with products in your price lists, you need to define a pricing rule for each product seperately

Billing an Annual Subscription

The annual subscriptions are billed from the purchase  date and for a whole year.  This means that are excluded from proration and no free period is applied.

Below is an example for understanding the differences between monthly and annually subscriptions.

• Customer  A is billed every 1st of the month and on 20th of October he purchased a monthly E3 plan
• Customer B is billed every 1st of the month and on 20th of October he purchased an annual E3 plan

Our system will generate the following invoices:

• Customer A
  • on 20th of October an invoice with zero amount will be generated for the period 20/10 - 31/10 since this period will be the free period for this subscription.
  • On 1st of November an invoice will be generated for the period 01/11 - 30/11. The invoice amount will be the monthly price for the E3 plan
• Customer B
  
  • On 20th of October an invoice for the period 20/10/2017 - 19/10/2018 will be generated. The invoice amount will be the annual price for the E3 plan.