[Vtigercrm-developers] Selling Subscription Services

[Rodrigo Souza]

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
e-mail/msn: rodrigo at hostplan.com.br



2014-07-07 5:00 GMT-03:00 Alan Lord <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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