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Soft Dates

Clicking the Soft Dates tab displays the Soft Dates home page. More about the home page.

• In the View section, select an appropriate list view from the drop-down list to go directly to that list page, or click Create New View to define your own custom list view. List views let you display a list of records that match specific criteria.
• In the Recent section, select an item from the drop-down list on the right to display a brief list of the top records matching that criteria. The choices are listed in the table that follows.
• From the list, you can click any object name to go directly to its detail.
• Click New to create a new soft date.
• To change the value of an editable field shown in the list double-click it, enter the value you want and click Save.

Recent Choice		Description
Recently Viewed		The last 10 or 25 records you viewed, with the most recently viewed item listed first. This list is derived from your recent items and includes records owned by you and other users.
Recently Created		The last 10 or 25 records you created, with the most recently created item listed first. This list only includes records owned by you.
Recently Modified		The last 10 or 25 records you updated, with the most recently updated item listed first. This list only includes records owned by you.

What is a Soft Date?

In FinancialForce Billing Central, a soft date enables you to calculate recurring dates based on a unit of time such as a week, month, quarter, or year. Soft dates can consist of:

• A reference that determines the unit of time, and whether the dates fall at the beginning or end of that unit of time
• An adjustment to the reference that determines the number of days or months to add or subtract

You can enter a reference, adjustment, or both using the format Reference+Adjustment. You can specify the unit of time in upper or lower case, for example, we+3d, MB-1D.

Soft dates determine the frequency and duration of plans and the billing period of billing schedules. For example, the billing term on contract lines with a recurring billing type such as Recurring Fixed or Recurring Variable is a soft date. When you activate the contract, billing schedules are created for the contract lines based on the start date, the billing term, and the number of billing terms. For more information and examples, see Calculating Billing Periods and Billing Dates.

The dates that a soft date generates are adjusted based on the calendar. This means that the resulting dates can vary depending on the interval chosen and the day from which the soft date is generated. For example, if the date is January 31, 2019 and the soft date is +1M, the next date is February 28, 2019 followed by March 31 then April 30. If the date is on a leap year such as 2020, the dates would be January 31, February 29, March 31, and April 30.

Reference

The reference consists of two letters in upper or lower case. The first letter indicates whether the date recurs on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis. The second letter indicates whether the date recurs at the beginning or end of the week, month, quarter, or year. For example:

Note:

Notes

By default, the start of a week is determined by the locale of your Salesforce OrgSalesforce organization. If a week start day is set in the Soft Date Week Start Day custom field of the FinancialForce Billing Central Settings custom setting this is used instead. See Soft Date Week Start Day.
Quarter dates are January 1- March 31, April 1 - June 30, July 1 - September 30, October 1 - December 31.

Adjustment

The adjustment consists of an operator followed by a whole number of one to three digits, which indicates whether to add or subtract from the date. This is followed by another letter that indicates whether to add or subtract days or months.

Note:

Note

If you only enter an adjustment, it must be positive.

Key: xxx – Whole number consisting of one to three digits.

Soft Date Examples

Here are some examples of soft date definitions:

Here are some valid combinations of Reference+Adjustment:

Note:

Note

These are examples. You can use upper or lower case, and you can enter your own number of days and months.

View Tutorial

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