System Complexity with various types of contract and subscription types.
This presentation walks through a variety of ways of handling intra-period modifications.
Video on YouTube
These images were used in the Video
They exist here for review
Monthly with cancellation at renewal
This is the simplest of subscriptions. The contract is simple. Cancellations happen at the end of the subscription period, usually monthly. There might be rate adjustments if you change the plan in the middle of the month but some services just ignore that or only upgrade at renewal.
Simple prepay with changes at renewal
This plan's payment cycle and subscription length are the same. Changes happen at the renewal no matter what the customer service reps says. I've seen this one when removing a wearable from our cell plan. It turns out they could only drop the device at the end of the month when service was "renewed".
Cycle change made for the renewal point before payment received
In this case, we made a change between the billing date and the payment. The company doesn't want to handle any pro-rating or partial payments. They just terminate the current subscription and create a new one with a start date of the change date. Every change is a virtual cancellation and recreation. This can move payment dates. Sometimes people ask for specific payment dates so this may result in short-period subscription fragments.
Changes dated during the next term before payment
This is a more complicated scenario simplified by the fact that we are asking for a change before the next payment is made. This is changing the contract cost and we want to keep the same contract terms and payment dates. The current subscription is maintained and the target payment is adjusted. Because no payment has yet been made in that period. No need to pro-rate or refund.
Note that contract terms might change over time. This can be problematic. We could retain contract terms across automatic renewals. New subscribers are getting newer, different, terms. In this situation our system would have to know that changes at certain points used the old terms while newer subscriptions would have to use the newer terms.
Changes in the current subscription term after new terms have been billed
This variant has us making changes in a given subscription term after the next term has been pre-created and staged. In this case, we need to edit the parameters of the current subscription, potentially pr-rated, and edit the parameters of the next subscription where the TOS or regulations could be different. In this case,e our system needs to deal with 2 different parts of one logical subscription.
Recognizing business debt vs business or regulatory design
Comments
Post a Comment