Overview
Plan Families allow you to define different service levels within the same family of offerings. For example, you may have a "Bronze/Silver/Gold" or a "Standard/Advanced" package. Each of the Plans in the family offers the same types of goods and services, but the customer receives higher or lower levels of services or entitlements based on the package they have purchased.
The Plan Family is simply a logical grouping of the Plans in the family, so they appear organized in your Catalog. The power of the Plan Family lies in the Relationships and Rules that you define among the different Plans. Using these concepts, you can control which upgrade and downgrade paths are "valid", and you can define how the different Products transfer between the Plans when they are migrated.
Using Plan Families with their associated Relationships and Rules support the following types of plan migrations:
- Upgrades and downgrades
- Frequency changes (e.g. migrate from monthly to yearly in the same Plan)
- Free trial conversions
- Plan updates (e.g. migrate to the 2017 version of a legacy Plan)
- "Custom" migrations
For more information about using Plan Families to migrate Subscriptions, see Migrating a Subscription.
Managing a Plan Family
The Plan Families page under Catalog contains a grid. Each Plan Family in the grid has a set of Action buttons as follows:
- Relationships - Click to manage the mappings between the plans in this family; it allows you to define valid migration paths and how the information is transferred between subscriptions when migrated. See Managing Relationships and Rules for more information.
- Plans - Add or remove Plans in this Family. See Managing Plans in a Family for more information.
- Edit - Edit the properties of the Family (Name, Code, Description, Default Migration behaviour, and Subscription Level Field Mappings).
- Remove - Delete this Plan Family and all of its underlying Relationships and Rules.
If you remove a Plan Family, all of its Relationships and Rules will also be deleted. This operation cannot be undone.
Creating a New Plan Family
- Click Create Plan Family to create a new family.
- Give the Plan Family a Name, Code, and Description.
- The Default Migration Behavior setting allows you to choose how the earnings are managed when migration occurs mid-period. From an accounting point of view, the source subscription's earnings must be accounted for properly and the destination subscription's earnings will then begin.
- Earn all charges - the source (old) subscription's earnings will be fully recognized. You would choose this option if the subscription has no pro-ration and you do not intend to provide a reversal or refund for a partial period when the migration occurs.
- Reverse all unearned amounts of all charges - Each product in the source subscription will earn a pro-rated amount based on the percentage of the period that has been consumed.
- Reverse all charges fully - Reverse all charges on the source subscription.
- The Subscription Level Field Mappings section allows you to define the default behaviour for these fields when migration occurs. Each of these fields can be automatically transferred over to the new subscription or not, depending on your choices.
- Name Override and Description Override - if the source subscription's name or description has been overridden from the default Plan values, then these values will be transferred over to the destination subscription. Typically, you would only want to transfer by default if most of your subscriptions do have an overridden name or description. Note that if there is no override, the migration will NOT transfer the default Plan name or description; it is assumed that you will want the new destination's values instead (e.g. Silver Plan instead of Bronze Plan).
- You can also choose whether or not to transfer the Reference field, Expiry (if applicable), and Contract Start and End Dates.
- Click Create to create the new Plan Family.