Introduction
This article is for you if you would like to pause a membership and you are considering an extension beyond the Licence End Date to recover charges not paid during the pause.
The steps below are only applicable to existing Licences.
The procedure below is not recommended for your usual activity; but rather as a temporary solution for special situations.
Please also keep in mind that the steps below may involve editing active Licences and staff will need to have the security access to do so. Administrators can enable the 'Can Edit Activated Licences' permission from the User record, for any staff member who should be able to make changes to active agreements.
These steps involve editing your Licences and zero-ing out product prices for the months during which you want to pause the membership. This will prevent the customer from being charged, since, even though issued, their invoices will be 0.
Please note that the 'Discount' field on Licence items will not display if List Price Discounts are not enabled. This will not affect your ability to go through these steps.
Adjusting Licence Prices
You can add free months anytime during the billing schedule. However, please keep in mind that this restricts you to pausing memberships according to the billing dates. If you need to pause in-between, please follow the steps described here.
To adjust the prices of your Licence Items:
Edit the Licence in question.
Edit an Office, Virtual Service or Contract Service, depending on what you want to pause.
Edit the Office/Service record as follows:
Enter '0' in the Monthly Price field corresponding to the first month you want to pause. You will notice that the price will become 0 for the subsequent schedule.
Leave the '0' price for as many months as you need and enter the product's price starting with the month when you want to start charging again. The price updates automatically starting with the month you entered it for until the end of the schedule. This happens every time you update the price, from the edited month until the end.
Extending a Licence
Extending a Licence means that you add to the billing schedule, so that the customer is billed for a longer period of time than initially agreed.
To extend, use the Extend option on you Licence (It needs to either have the Activated or Expiring status for this to work correctly).
On the next screen, use the Calendar tool to select the new term end date, then click Extend Licence.
Once this is done and the initial term end date passes, the Licence will continue being active instead of expiring. It will expire at the date up to which it was extended. Billing will also continue until the extension ends as well. If the Licence is set to autorenew, this will occur after the extension (Please see below!).
Implications
Licence on Autorenew
If the Licence you are extending is set to autorenew, you will need to also update the autorenew date and escalation dates on Licence Items. Please see Enabling Licence Agreement Renewals and Price Increases for a detailed guide on how to do this. Autorenew should be changed to the date up to which the Licence has been extended. Once this date is reached, the Licence will renew automatically for the configured term (which is not affected by the extension).