Contracts provide the flexibility to have customers opt-in or opt-out of subscriptions and allow the opportunity to communicate with customers via email, or other systems via event notifications.
By creating a contract, you can specify a duration for which a plan should be assigned to an account and what action should be taken after the contract has expired. For more on contract scope and creating contracts in Aria, reference Create a Contract.
The following are common use cases for setting up contracts within Aria.
A contract can be used to ensure that a cancellation fee will be charged if a customer cancels their subscription within a certain time-frame.
A cancellation fee can be set up by entering an amount into the Early Cancellation Fee field when creating a contract.
Note: You cannot assign an early cancellation fee to a multi-plan or universal contract (selected within the scope assignment prior to the contract creation).
A contract in Aria can trigger events so that external systems can take action for more complex scenarios. For example, an event can be sent to an external system which can contact a customer via email.
To subscribe to these event notifications, navigate to Configuration > Notifications > Events and enable all applicable contract-related events:
Accounts
Account Notifications
Refer to Subscribe to Event Notifications for further instruction on enabling event notifications and setting up the associated steps.
Contracts can be beneficial to use for trial subscriptions or other changes in price that need to occur beyond an initial period.
A contract start date can be set independent of the account billing date by entering a date in the Contract Start Date field when creating a contract.
For subscriptions that expire without automatic renewal, contracts allow the plan, or the account, to stop billing, independent of queuing a plan.
Note: Events fired for provisioning still have an impact on other systems.
Contracts can be used to provide a custom flat rate as an alternative to other price overrides and discounts.