Service Contract future start date error

Looking at Service Contracts, how can you have a future start date?

For example, sell a product which has a 1 year factory warranty. We want to sell a service contract (i.e. extended warranty) along with the product that starts when the factory warranty ends (one year from now).

If I create a service contract with an Effective Date one year out, when I go to add the service contract line to the sales order, I get a business logic error of “All contract and renewal lines, based on the sales order date, have been assigned to a sales order. Cannot add this contract to this sales order.”

Any thoughts on how I can get it to start one year from now?

Yeah I just started looking at these. It’s madness, right?

The only thing I figured out so far is that I had to change the sales order date to the future. It wasn’t the line or release date which was so weird to me. And really useless for multi-line orders.

And then you can’t ship the contract with the part on the same pack if the part is serialized, which… of course it is, because it’s got a service contract…

I think we ended up dodging a bullet with this and we won’t formally charge for contracts till after the initial warranty ends. But I would like to know, also, how to do this.

Seems like directly invoicing solves some problems, but then it is no longer linked to the original order.

image

Yes, that order date

Your best bet is to report this through support or by a new idea in the Ideas portal.

I just entered a ticket with Support so we’ll see where that goes. Also read through release notes for 10.2.400, 500, 600, and 700 and did not find the issues addressed.

Any news on this, perchance?

Hey Jason - unfortunately no. All I got was definitions of renewal periods and expiration horizons, neither of which allow me to set a future start date. If I do figure it out I’ll be sure to post an update.

-Jeff

Thanks Jeff. I was afraid of that.

I am really trying to make the contract thing work with serial numbers, but it is awful. Now I’m dealing with serial matching, which we don’t do, but I guess I was supposed to think of it five years ago when we went live, so that I could do contracts properly today. Mamma mia.