2015-4Q: Billing: Vacation Hold (VH) - Primary/Secondary Options for Subscription Override

Section One: Feature Overview

A new feature has been added to SIMPLer which will help manage situations where a new subscription should temporarily override the customer's usual subscription for a defined period.

This feature is revisited and was upgraded to work automated as well as manually. In section four and five of this document the automated and manual process is described.

Section Two: Feature Use Cases

Current use cases for this feature are:

• Vacation/Seasonal customers: Customers who go on "vacation" for certain times of the year and would need to have their usual subscription de-activated for a defined period and replaced with a smaller monthly fee.

Section Three: Feature Main Settings

In using the feature there are three main settings to be aware of.

1. Under the Settings - Modify WISP page, as shown in Fig. 1, there is an option called "Subscription Default Override Period" as shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 1: Modify WISP

Fig. 3: Default Override Option per product

Note: The moment the product is created as "Primary" the option to "Activate" the Vacation Hold product is visible on the customer account as shown in Fig. 4 - under the section "Customer Billing Details" :

Fig. 6: Monthly Package

The following steps should be taking when setting up the vacation customer:

Step One: Navigate to the section 'Customer Billing Details' and find title 'Activate Product to toggle on the 'Activate' button as indicated in fig. 7

Today is Jan 30 2019 and customer calls in to indicate he is leaving for holiday.

Fig. 7 Vacation hold product

As January invoice was already issued, customer will receive a credit for of the charged subscription for the remaining days of January and customer is charged the lower price of the Vacation Hold for the same period.

Step Two: A console will pop up that allows for review - fig. 8. Select the button 'Submit' proceeds to generate an invoice. The credit invoice is sent to customer email at this stage.

Fig. 8 Review pop up screen

The credit shows under the section 'Last 5 Invoices' as shown in Fig.9

Fig. 9 Credit Invoice

The customer account reflect the Next Invoice that will be generated against the lower price of the Vacation Hold (A), in this example Eur 15. The account also shows the vacation hold activation; status 'ON' (B). - both shown in Fig. 10

Fig. 10 Next invoice charge & VH activated

Note that on customer account during their holiday the following two subscriptions are visible under their subscription as shown in fig. 11.

On February 4th 2019 the system will revert to billing for the regular product. Red circle indicates vacation plan start and end date. Green circle regular subscription will resume.

Fig. 12 Review end Vacation Hold

Section Five: Example (manual)

Customer training test is on a monthly package for $52.70 (see fig. 13). The customer calls the office and would like to go on vacation today, for six months.

Fig. 16: Update Subscriptions

Step Four: Tonight, at 11.15pm, the system will scan for any overridden subscriptions and will calculate and generate an invoice for December 9th - January 1st for a prorated amount of the vacation product, and crediting back the already invoiced portion of the December 1st invoice. On June 9th 2016 the system will revert to billing for the regular product.