What is the End Date Alignment (Coterminosity)
The End Date Alignment is enabling NCE Coterminosity and has been designed to enhance the Marketplace experience for your customers and streamline the billing operations both for you and your customers. More specifically, the End-Date Alignment is designed to enable partners to align a new NCE seat-based subscription to an existing NCE subscription’s end date. A major issue that is addressed now is that of the end date alignment of a base and an add-on subscription.
Rules for Coterminating NCE Subscriptions
The existing NCE subscriptions from which the user may select and coterminate a new NCE subscription with, uphold the following rules:
The existing NCE subscriptions must be active, either base subscriptions or add-on subscriptions.
Active subscriptions purchased with flexible billing plans (monthly or annual installments) may also be eligible for selection.
Existing active subscriptions across the same MSFT tenant are eligible for selection.
Existing active subscriptions across the same MSFT tenant and under the Reseller’s MPNID are available for selection.
The End-Date alignment is not available for the following cases:
Trial subscriptions cannot be coterminated with an existing subscription.
Subscriptions from any other product type, other than Microsoft NCE Online Services.
Software Subscriptions/Perpetual Licenses are not eligible for the End-Date Alignment.
Subscriptions of any other status other than active.
Subscriptions of any other provisioning sync status other than Synchronized.
Legacy subscriptions.
The first term after setting up the End-Date Alignment can be shorter than the full term to align the renew date with an existing subscription. After the first renewal the subscription will run for the full term only. The charges will be prorated for the first short term. Please see the examples presented below.
Ordering NCE Seat-Based Offerings and Aligning the End-Date
Storefront Buyers have the option, while ordering New Commerce Experience (NCE) seat-based products (either for personal use or for reselling), to choose if they wish to align the end date of the subscription, which is about to be created, with the end date of an existing active NCE subscription, that upholds the aforementioned rules.
In the following table, you can better understand the relationship between the existing NCE subscriptions and the new NCE subscription, which is about to be created with coterminosity.
Existing NCE Subscription | New NCE Subscription | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
Terms | 1-Month | 1-Year | 3-Years | |
1-Month | YES | NO | NO | |
1-Year | YES | YES | YES | |
3-Years | YES | YES | YES | |
The End-Date Alignment feature is available in the Storefront Basket Items page only on eligible NCE products. This means that for every order item that supports the end date alignment feature, a toggle button appears (and is off by default) next to the wording End Date Alignment, underneath the friendly name of the subscription.
Once the toggle button is turned ON, a pop-up window appears, allowing the Storefront Buyer user to align the subscription end date with another existing NCE subscription, which will be chosen via a list of available subscriptions. The list of available subscriptions is populated based on the rules mentioned above.
On this drop-down list, Storefront Buyer users can see the existing subscriptions that fit the profile already mentioned, their subscriptions friendly names, billing cycles (terms), and end dates.
In case of no eligible active NCE seat-based subscription availability, an informative message appears within the pop-up stating: “No active non-trial NCE subscriptions to align with”.
Once the Storefront Buyer user select a subscription to align with, they can see the new end date of their subscription to be created on a preview, on the same pop-up window, under the section called Adjustment Preview.
When the Storefront Buyer user have selected a specific end date from an existing NCE subscription and click on the Save button, the pop-up window closes, and they can see their chosen end date next to the End Day Alignment toggle, along with a pencil icon, in case they wish to re-edit the end date of the subscription.
If Storefront Buyer user no longer want to apply the End-Date Alignment, they can simply switch the toggle button OFF again, and the subscription end date will return to its original value.
Once the Storefront Buyer user successfully complete the checkout process, the new NCE subscription will be created and will have the same end date as the existing active NCE subscription that the user had previously chosen.
NCE Coterminosity Examples
In this section, you can find five tabs with end-date alignment examples from the Microsoft documentation to better understand how the actual NCE Coterminosity functions.
Managing Coterminated NCE Subscriptions
The following bullet points briefly explain how the coterminated NCE subscriptions are managed.
Invoices: The prorated amount of a coterminated NCE subscription is calculated similarly to a subscription with proration which essentially creates a mini billing cycle at the beginning(first billing cycle) until the second billing cycle when the two subscriptions will be fully aligned.
Upgrade: The full and partial upgrades of coterminated NCE subscriptions are fully supported since they create a new subscription from scratch, and that new subscription has as the Start Date the date of ’s end date of the coterminated NCE subscription was based on.
Suspension: The new commerce experience (NCE) suspension policies apply here, as well. Microsoft Partners can suspend and then resume a coterminated NCE subscription at any time without cancellation or termination. However, the billing of the Partner continues during the suspension.
Cancellation: The new commerce experience (NCE) cancellation policies apply here, as well. Therefore, the new coterminated NCE subscription has a 7-day cancellation window, within which it can be canceled, in the prorated way. As a result of a cancellation within the allowed timeframe, a prorated credit invoice is created and is based on the number of active days in this first (short) billing cycle.
Installments: Currently, the feature of coterminosity is incompatible with the feature of Installments. However, in the upcoming releases, it will become available.
Import Customers Tool: Coterminated NCE subscriptions are fully supported on the Import Customers Tool.
Health Check Mechanism: The Health Check Mechanism (HCM) fully support coterminated subscriptions.
Price Protection: The coterminated NCE are price protected with the same rules that apply to all NCE subscriptions. Since the first billing cycle of the newly created coterminated NCE subscription is short, the price protection effective end date also follows that logic. On renewal, the subscription will enter a new price-protected period and the protected prices will be the prices that are in effect on renewal.
For example:
Let’s assume you are ordering an NCE Product with a price protection term=12 on an annual unit.
The existing NCE subscription End Date (the one that you want to be aligned to) is 31/10/2023.
The new NCE subscription is eligible for cotermination and has a Start Date of 20/6/2023.
➡️ The first (short) billing cycle of the (new) coterminated NCE subscriptions is: 20/06/2023 - 31/10/2023
➡️ The second (normal) renewed billing cycle of the (new) coterminated NCE subscription is: 01/11/2023 - 31/10/2024
Therefore, the prices of the (new) coterminated NCE subscription will be protected during the first (short) billing cycle, and on subscription renewal, the latest prices and price protection will be automatically retrieved one last time, and those new price-protected prices will be applied for the rest of the term, which in this case is 12 months.