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Amendments

Zuora

Amendments

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Creating and amending subscriptions in the Zuora Billing UI is only relevant for existing Subscribe and Amend customers who have not transitioned to Orders or Orders Harmonization. Any new customers will not see this UI.

In this section, you will learn how Zuora Billing handles changes to subscriptions using amendments, what type of amendments can be made to a subscription, and how to view an entire life cycle of a subscription.

About Amendments

Amendments represent a change to a customer’s original subscription. Each subscription can have multiple amendments. Zuora's amendments module allows you to seamlessly upgrade or downgrade a customer from one product or rate plan to the next. For example, you can manage and automate the processes for mid-term contractual changes, such as "add five users at the start of next month" or "add a new product that is co-terminus with the original subscription."

Amendments can be created to:

  • Modify Terms and Conditions
  • Add Products
  • Update Products
  • Remove Products
  • Renew Subscriptions
  • Cancel Subscriptions

When an amendment is created, Z-Billing automatically calculates the new charges and any proration charges resulting from the amendment. In addition, changes to the customer's MRR (monthly recurring revenue) are automatically updated after the amendment is created and activated. At any time, your customer service representatives can view the complete audit trail to see a full history of all the changes over the course of the subscription's life cycle. Subscription businesses require this level of flexibility to handle change orders (amendments) at any time and as often as needed.

Key Concepts

Here are the key concepts to understand when using amendments to update subscriptions in Zuora:

  • Selecting Amendment Types: When you create an amendment in Zuora, there are five amendment types you can choose from: Terms and Conditions (T&Cs), New Product, Update a Product, Remove a Product, and Renewal. Each amendment type describes an action you can take to modify an existing subscription.
  • Creating Multiple Amendments for Upgrades and Downgrades: Depending on the type of upgrade or downgrade, you may need to create more than one amendment to reflect this subscription change. For example, a customer on the Enterprise Edition of your product wants to downgrade to the Business Edition. To reflect this downgrade, you will create one amendment (type = Remove a Product) to remove the Enterprise Edition from the subscription, and you will create a second amendment (type = New Product) to add the Business Edition to the subscription.
  • Cancelling a Subscription: When a subscription is canceled, an amendment will be created to reflect the cancelation, and the subscription will show a status of canceled. A subscription can be canceled on a certain date, at the end of the subscription term, or at the end of the last invoiced period. Canceling it at the end of the last invoiced period does not result in any credits back to the customer. Canceling on a future date or at the end of the subscription term results in the subscription being billed through the cancelation date.
  • Deleting an Amendment: If an amendment was created in error and must be undone, you can delete the erroneous amendment. An amendment can only be deleted if no billing charges contained in the amendment have yet to be invoiced through a billing run. One exception to this rule is auto-renew amendments. You can delete the last auto-renew amendment even if an invoice has been generated.
  • Viewing a Subscription History: Each amendment to a subscription creates a new version of that subscription. From the subscription page, you can see all versions in the entire life cycle of that subscription.

Additional Resources and Activities

To learn more about Amendments:

  • Review the documentation on Amendments.
  • Access your company's Z-Billing test account on the Zuora API Sandbox and amend a subscription that you created in the prior section as below:
    1. Create two amendments, one to remove an existing product and one to add a new product.
    2. In the subscription with amendments, click through the different versions of the subscription. Each version is indicated by a number to the right of "Version" under the "Basic Information" section of the subscription.
    3. Cancel a subscription and then reverse the cancellation by deleting the cancellation amendment.