[Vtigercrm-developers] Fwd: Re: Selling Subscription Services

[Vic Cekvenich]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Re: [Vtigercrm-developers] Selling Subscription Services
Date: 	Mon, 7 Jul 2014 11:42:39 -0300
From: 	Rodrigo Souza <rodrigo at hostplan.com.br>
Reply-To: 	vtigercrm-developers at lists.vtigercrm.com
To: 	vtigercrm-developers at lists.vtigercrm.com



I would solve it by converting a Quote to Sales Order, I could 
"dismember" items, ie, generate a SO for service items and other items 
for the product ... or according to the frequency of each item

Atte,
*Rodrigo Souza de Oliveira*
*Consultor de TI
*Hostplan Informática Ltda
Telefones: (21) 9-8153-5287
website: www.hostplan.com.br <http://www.hostplan.com.br>
e-mail/msn: rodrigo at hostplan.com.br <mailto:rodrigo at hostplan.com.br>



2014-07-07 5:00 GMT-03:00 Alan Lord <alanslists at gmail.com 
<mailto:alanslists at gmail.com>>:

    On 06/07/14 20:01, Sreenivas Kanumuru wrote:

        Hi Alan,


    Hi Sreenivas,


        As you noted, currently all items in the sales order are going to be
        invoiced at the same frequency for the same period (if recurring
        invoice
        is enabled in Salesorder). What you are looking for is to have
        different
        items in the Salesorder to be invoiced on different intervals. The
        alternative as it stands now is to create different Sales Orders for
        different recurring services.


    Almost. This starts at the Quote stage. Some items on a quote may be
    of a recurring type, some may not.

    I might, for example have a few items on a quote like this:

    Item                 qty         Unit price       Total
    Phone System          1          $5000            $5000
    Handsets              12         $100             $1200
    Installation          1          $1000            $1000
    Line Rental           2          $50              $100 (Needs to be
    a recurring monthly bill maybe on the 1st of each month)
    Maintenance Contract  1          $100             $100 (Might be
    monthly, quarterly, annually...)

    But the point is it needs to be able to deal with both one-off and
    recurring items on the same quote.

    These then need to propagate through the system: Quote -> Sales
    Order -> Invoice.

    At the appropriate time a new Invoice would need to be generated for
    the item(s) on the original SO (or first Invoice).

    The customer who enquired about this feature last week, wanted to
    have two separate totals on the Quote/SQ/Invoice, keeping the
    one-off and recurring items in two separate "blocks" but still
    within the same Quote. This really does make sense as the values in
    the recurring area have a different meaning when it comes to
    reporting and forecasting your business going forward.


        Currently, Recurring frequency and Term are fields in the Sales
        Order.
        You are asking for these fields to be added to the Service record
        itself, so that when the Service is added to the Invoice, the
        Invoice is
        automatically created on a periodic basis. Currently, this is
        decided in
        the Sales Order. The invoices should be recreated by the system
        automatically if the Invoice is approved (status). If the
        invoice has 2
        items, and one of them is to be recurring on a monthly interval, and
        another on a quarterly interval, and the invoice status=
        approved, then
        every month an invoice for monthly item has to be created by the
        system,
        and every quarter another invoice has to be created by the
        system for
        quarterly item.

        Does the above match with your thinking.


    Not quite. The frequency, interval, etc. need to be in the Quote
    itself, not in the Product or Service entity record. You might sell
    a Service (or Product) to one customer with a monthly frequency and
    to another quarterly. I think, the Product/Service record would need
    a simple flag to indicate if it can be sold as a recurring item, a
    one-off item or either. Then the person building the Quote can
    choose which of the two blocks to add the line item to and what the
    frequency, interval etc. should be.

    Please do not assume that recurring items will *only* be Services.
    If a customer wants to sell a physical widget with a monthly
    recurring price who are we to say they shouldn't ;-)



        The issue with the proposed model is that the info to recreate an
        invoice is within the invoice. It will be hard to identify which
        invoice
        is the master. System should go through all invoices that have
        recurring
        services, to see if it needs to recreate the invoice. Currently,
        there
        is a checkbox in SalesOrder that indicates whether a recurring
        invoice
        is to be created, which is much simpler to identify.

        I am hoping we will get some good suggestions to address this need.


    It would seem to me that some kind of "parentid" column could be
    added to the vtiger_invoice table for this purpose?

    I would imagine the scheduler running each night and looking for
    recurring items that are due, taking the id of the invoice, then
    creating a new one with a parentid. Invoices with a parentid would
    be ignored by the scheduler.

    It's just occurred to me that to make this work there would also
    need to be the option to configure a maximum qty of repeats. For
    example, perhaps the recurring item should only run for 12 months?

    So we'd need to be able to specify:

    Frequency, Interval, [date or other meta value], [quantity]

    The date might need to be something like, the "Last Friday of the
    Month" or the "First Working Day of the Month" as opposed to a
    specific day of the month (and of course leap years and February
    make this even more troublesome), or something else...

    HTH

    Al



    _________________________________________________
    http://www.vtiger.com/


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