Contracts

Path: Business functionality > Sales > Subscription billing > Contracts · tier official · system sales · narrative reviewed (checked by Opus)

Overview

This section covers the contract side of Subscription Billing. Customer subscription contracts record obligations to customers and resemble sales orders, with billing and shipping address details, contract lines, and invoice discounts. Vendor subscription contracts record supplier liabilities and support extending contracts, merging lines, creating invoices per contract, and tracking closed lines.

Subscriptions hold the history of products sold to customers, including item and customer data, quantity, dates, and subscription lines with pricing and terms. Planned subscription lines describe the monetary content of customer and supplier agreements, including billing recurrence and termination dates. The page on managing contracts, subscriptions, and subscription lines explains the key fields, such as billing rhythm, calculation base amount, billing base period, and line end date.

Other pages cover lifecycle tasks: renewing contracts through sales quotes and orders, cancelling lines using notice periods and terms, updating prices with templates, and deferring revenue and cost to future periods. Start with Customer subscription contracts and Managing contracts, subscriptions, and subscription lines, then move to the task page you need.

Key points

• Customer subscription contracts hold contract lines, billing and shipping addresses, invoice details, and invoice discounts, and are used to generate contract invoices.
• Vendor subscription contracts support contract extension, merging contract lines, invoice creation per contract, and viewing closed contract lines.
• Subscriptions record products sold to customers, with serial number tracking, attributes, quantity changes, and subscription lines with pricing.
• Renewal extends lines at their end date by creating sales quotes and converting them to orders, which updates the subscription line end dates.
• Cancellation depends on Subscription Line End Date, Cancellation Possible Until date, Term Until date, notice period, initial term, and subsequent term.
• Price updates use a Price Update Template with a method (percentage, calculation base, or item list prices), Price Binding Period, and Perform Update on Date; planned or immediate changes are possible.
• Contract deferrals defer customer revenue and vendor cost to future periods, are created automatically, and use accrual accounts, posting groups, and monthly release.
• Planned subscription lines carry billing recurrence and termination dates, with change logging and archiving of subscription lines.

Learn pages

• Cancel planned subscription lines: You can cancel planned subscription lines in subscription billing.
• Customer subscription contracts: You can use customer subscription contracts in subscription billing.
• Managing contracts, subscriptions, and subscription lines: You can manage subscription contracts in subscription billing.
• Planned subscription lines in subscriptions: You can use planned subscription lines with subscriptions in subscription billing.
• Subscription contract deferrals: You can use contract deferrals in subscription billing.
• Subscription contract renewal: You can renew contracts in subscription billing.
• Subscriptions: You can use subscriptions in subscription billing.
• Update prices: You can update prices in subscription billing.
• Vendor subscription contracts: You can use vendor subscription contracts in subscription billing.

Videos and posts

Linked by a Haiku matcher with a grounding quote from the item’s summary (link/topics.ts); machine-generated.

• What’s New: Subscription Billing (2024 release wave 2) (video): “contracts; billing proposals; pricing; automation; usage-based billing; contract management”

Business Central pages and reports

The pages, reports and queries this hub’s Learn pages name (ms.search.form, API reference), joined to the code by exact object id (data/index/docs-objects.json); a page shows the table it runs on.

• Page 314 “General Posting Setup” · on Table 252 “General Posting Setup”
• Page 8004 “Planned Service Commitments” · captioned “Planned Subscription Lines” · on Table 8002 “Planned Subscription Line”
• Page 8005 “Contract Renewal” · captioned “Subscription Contract Renewal” · on Table 8001 “Sub. Contract Renewal Line”
• Page 8014 “Service Commitments List” · captioned “Subscription Lines” · on Table 8059 “Subscription Line”
• Page 8015 “Sales Service Commitments List” · captioned “Sales Subscription Lines” · on Table 8068 “Sales Subscription Line”
• Page 8025 “Contract Price Update” · captioned “Subscription Contract Price Update” · on Table 8004 “Sub. Contr. Price Update Line”
• Page 8052 “Customer Contract” · captioned “Customer Subscription Contract” · on Table 8052 “Customer Subscription Contract”
• Page 8053 “Customer Contracts” · captioned “Customer Subscription Contracts” · on Table 8052 “Customer Subscription Contract”
• Page 8059 “Service Objects” · captioned “Subscriptions” · on Table 8057 “Subscription Header”
• Page 8060 “Service Object” · captioned “Subscription” · on Table 8057 “Subscription Header”
• Page 8070 “Vendor Contract” · captioned “Vendor Subscription Contract” · on Table 8063 “Vendor Subscription Contract”
• Page 8071 “Vendor Contracts” · captioned “Vendor Subscription Contracts” · on Table 8063 “Vendor Subscription Contract”
• Page 8079 “Customer Contract Deferrals” · captioned “Customer Subscription Contract Deferrals” · on Table 8066 “Cust. Sub. Contract Deferral”

Source: Microsoft Learn (CC BY 4.0). Descriptions are Learn’s own.