About the contract life cycle

Once you have prepared a contract, you can initiate it.

If the services covered by a contract require setup before contract activation, you may initiate invoicing for the setup separately.

For example, contracts involving Internet access may require installation of a router or other equipment.
You initiate the contract setup: the contract becomes effective and the customer is invoiced for any services associated with setup.
At this point, you can no longer modify the terms and scope of the contract.
When setup is finished, you activate the contract and start to invoice the customer recurrently.
If you do not need to separate the setup of the contract and the activation, these steps can be done simultaneously.

For details, see: About contract setup and activation.

During this stage, the longest of the contract life cycle, the customer uses
services described in the contract, and invoicing is performed according to the terms defined in the contract and the contract items.

For details, see About contract usage recording and About contract invoicing.

You or the customer may want to change (upgrade or downgrade) a set of services within the scope of an active contract.
Both contract upgrading and downgrading are done in two steps: preparation and activation.
During preparation, contract invoicing and the provision of services are done according to the initial settings of the contract.

For details, see: Make changes to contract services.

Each time you run the contract invoicing process, it checks whether the next invoicing date exceeds or equals a contract expiration date. If it does, the contract invoicing process sets the next invoicing day equal to the contract expiration date.
The next time you run the contract invoicing process, it generates invoice for the contract usage and changes the contract status to Expired. You can not record any usage for expired contracts. Expired contracts can be either renewed or terminated:

Renewal (optional)

The renewal scenario depends on the expired contract type, which is defined by the contract template.

There are three types of contracts:

Renewable

During the renewal process, the system changes the expiration date of a contract and generates an invoice for the renewal fee, if any. After renewal is completed, the contract is again in the fulfilment stage.
A contract should be renewed during its grace period; otherwise, the renewal process creates a copy of the contract with the Draft status. You need to activate the copied contract to start the provision of services.

Expiring

A contract of this type expires at the end of its duration, but it is available for a renewal operation—manual or automatic (if scheduled). When such a contract is renewed, a copy of the expired contract is created with the Draft status, and you need to activate the copied contract to start the provision of services.

Unlimited

A contract of this type has no expiration date and can be terminated only.

For details about renewing contracts, see: About contract renewal.

Termination (optional)

You can terminate an expired contract if you are not going to renew or copy it.
Also, contract termination may be done at any point in the contract life cycle, if you or the customer decide to terminate the relationship defined by a contract. When you initiate contract termination, the system gathers information on the not yet invoiced usage of a contract and issues an invoice or a credit memo, if needed.
The termination date must be within the current invoicing period (between the Last invoicing date and the Next invoicing date).