This document will continue to evolve as existing sections change and new information is added. All updates appear in the following table:
| Date | Feature | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 16 NOV 2018 | Created initial document. |
Oracle Subscription Management provides a complete subscription selling, authoring, and execution solution to manage subscriptions, such as monthly digital media subscription, and complex usage-based products such as cloud data storage.
This guide outlines the information you need to know about new or improved functionality in this update.
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Use the Oracle Fusion Pricing Cloud or the Oracle Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) Cloud Service to create different price plans for the products. Both pricing applications support the following charge types:
- One-time charges, such as activation fees
- Recurring charges, such as monthly membership charges
- Usage-based charges, such as monthly cloud storage consumption fees
You can set up different price plans, such as yearly plans or monthly plans, and associate the one-time, recurring, or usage charges with the plans. Before you can create a price plan, products (item records) must be created in product information master.
Usage Tiers, Allowance, and Overage
Set up usage allowances for a billing period and define an overage charge for every additional unit consumed during the billing period. For example, the first 100 GB of data consumption per billing period can be free, and the customer can be charged 1.00 U.S. dollar for every additional GB of data consumed above the 100 GB allowance.
You can add tier pricing to the plan to adjust the price according to the usage consumption. For example, if the customer uses 20 GB of data, then use tier 1 with a price of 2.00 U.S. dollars per GB, and if the customer uses 40 GB of data, then use tier 2 with a price of 1.50 U.S. dollars per GB. The tiers can be applied to every unit of consumption or a block of units.
Automatic Discounts, Promotions, and Offers
Set up automatic adjustments, such as promotions and offers, at the price plan or for a specific customer. You can adjust the price using a discount percentage, discount amount, markup percentage, markup amount, or price override adjustment models.
Add manual adjustments during the subscription negotiation process, for example, you can waive off the one-time activation fee or discount all charges by 50% for the first 3 months. Oracle Subscription Management supports the following discount options:
- All Term
- First X Period
- Last X Period
- Manual Discount
Anniversary pricing, also referred to as a pricing term, supports a pricing model that includes planned pricing changes over time. For example, you can offer an introductory price for your customer for a lower entry price and then gradually increase it using the anniversary pricing feature.
Subscription Management Billing enables organizations to bill their customers in an efficient and accurate manner. Invoices are generated automatically based on the bill lines generated in Subscription Management.
You can bill your customers monthly, quarterly or yearly. Using the Manage Time Units Mappings task you can configure and use your own billing frequencies.
Support for Billing in Advance and Arrears
You can bill your customers in advance or in arrears for the one time and recurring charges. Usage charges are always billed in arrears.
Support for Partial Period Billing
You can set attributes that enable the application to calculate billing for partial periods. You can choose to align the partial period billing with the standard calendar or with the subscription start date. You can also choose if you want to use a fixed duration for a period or have the system compute the actual duration for every period.
Prepayment Support at Subscription Product and Charge Levels
You can capture prepayments for a subscription product as well as for a specific charge. The invoice amounts for the initial periods will become zero depending on how much prepayment is collected. For example, when subscribing for certain memberships, if your customer is billed semi-annually for an amount of $x per month in advance and if he/she prepays for 2 years, the first 4 semi-annual billing periods will have invoices generated with $0.
You can configure how you want to describe every invoice line item. One example of a configurable invoice text is <subscription line name>: <line start date> - <line end date>. The sample value would be 1 Yr Club Membership: 01/01/2018 - 12/31/2018.
Charge your customers based on how much they consume by deploying usage rating and billing.
The usage rating information is acquired from any third-party rating system using a scheduled process. Alternately, the usage rating of a specific bill line can also be acquired on a case-by-case basis. This usage rating process is applicable to all the subscription lines that have charges of usage type. Once the usage rating is acquired, the same can be reviewed and corrected manually before the bill lines are invoiced.
Preview the the billing schedules for accuracy before they are interfaced to Oracle Financials Cloud.
Pre-Built Integration with Oracle Financials Cloud
Automate the invoice and memo creation processes using the supplied integration with Oracle Financials Cloud. The bidirectional integration periodically sends billing information to Financials Cloud for invoicing, without any manual intervention, and also pulls invoice information from Financials Cloud.
You can also get full visibility of the invoices created in Financials Cloud from the Subscription Management user interfaces to help you resolve customer billing inquiries.
Oracle Subscription Management is integrated with Oracle Revenue Management Cloud Service to support revenue recognition in compliance with the new ASC 606 and IFRS 15 accounting standards. The integration supports all scenarios in the subscription life cycle management, including:
- Subscription ordering with one-time, recurring, and usage charges
- Support for termed and evergreen subscriptions, subscription amendments, subscription termination, subscription renewal, and pricing terms
Using the renewals management capabilities in Subscription Management, you can automate the renewal of subscriptions, ensuring that there is no revenue leakage.
Renewal Rules and Automatic Price Changes: You can choose to start the renewal process early by setting up renewal rules to trigger the renewal subscription creation in advance, thereby allowing sufficient time for negotiation. You can set up renewal rules to consolidate multiple subscriptions and co-terminate the dates of the different subscription products. You can set up automatic price changes – markup, markdown, and reprice – to use the latest price at the time of renewal.
Quoting and Reminder Notifications: You can configure renewal quotes and reminder notifications at user-defined intervals prior to subscription expiration using event notifications rules. Sales representatives are notified of upcoming expiration so that they can proactively start the negotiation process. In addition, quotes and reminder notifications can be delivered directly to customers. The event notification rules framework is integrated with BI Publisher which provides rich text format and multiple language support for all notifications.
Renewal Workflow: You can use the event model to configure and automate the renewal process states, actions, rules, and branching conditions. For example, using the event model, you can trigger a number of tasks, including generating the renewal quote, emailing the customer when the customer fails to pay, and submitting the subscription for internal approval.
Use the subscription amendment feature to amend subscription products. You can use a guided flow to initiate a subscription product amendment such as Upgrade, Downgrade, etc.
You can initiate both future-dated and past-dated amendments. Oracle Subscription Management calculates the credit due to the customer based on the selected credit options.
Use the subscription termination feature to prematurely terminate a subscription. Oracle Subscription Management calculates the credit due to the customer based on the credit options defined for the subscription product. Customers may be refunded in full or the credit amount may be prorated based on the termination date of the service.
Pre-Built Integration with Oracle CPQ Cloud
By using the pre-built integration between Oracle Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) Cloud Service and Oracle Subscription Management, you can support the complete subscription quote to cash business flow in Oracle Cloud.
This integration supports the following process flows:
- Subscription Ordering: Create a quote in CPQ Cloud, invoking Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS) to create a subscription in Oracle Subscription Management.
- Subscription Amendment: Amend a subscription by changing the subscription quantity, duration, or product.
- Subscription Renewal: Renew an existing subscription.
- Usage Rating: Rate the usage charge based on the consumption data.
Subscription Management supports various developers and system administrators tools to tailor all parts of the object model, business logic, and user interface.
Use Application Composer to extend the object model and configure all aspects of the user interface. You can also write field validations, object validations, and data triggers in industry-standard Groovy language.
Personalize the user interface of Oracle Subscription Management using Oracle Page Composer.
Use the event model for business process and logic adjustments. The event model has a easy to use interface to add custom state transitions and events. You can invoke contract validations, send notifications to both customers and internal salespeople, raise a business event, etc. You can also remove or change the severity of optional supplied contract validations using the event model.
Real-Time Subscription Account Metrics
Get real-time information about your accounts' subscriptions, such as Monthly Recurring Revenue and Total Contract Value. You can have all your subscription information at a glance, always current, organized in a single dashboard that's easy to understand.
RESTful Services to Create and Manage Subscriptions
Subscription Management API is organized around REST resource-oriented URLs and uses standard HTTP response codes. You can use the REST services to manage the life cycle of a subscription using the Subscription and Subscription Product resources.
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