Amending Prices on Contracts in Bulk

You can apply a percentage price change to contracts in bulk from the billing contracts list view.

To do this:

  1. Click the Billing Contracts tab.
  2. Select a list view to display the billing contracts you're interested in.
  3. Select the checkboxes of the contracts you want to amend. If you select any contracts that are change requests or are not active contracts, they will be excluded automatically because they are not eligible for price amendment.
  4. Click Amend Prices. A message will warn you if any of the selected contracts have been excluded.
  5. Enter the percentage by which you want to change the unit prices. This can be a positive value to increase prices, or a negative value to reduce prices.
  6. Enter the date from which the new unit prices are effective.

    Information text on the Amend Prices window explains whether the new prices will be charged immediately (new lines will start on the Effective from Date) or when the contract line items are next billed (new lines will start at the beginning of the next unbilled billing period that falls on or after the Effective from Date). The way contract line items are changed to reflect price amendments varies depending on which mode your org is configured to use. For more information about the two modes, see Amend Prices Overview.

  7. Click Amend to start a background process to create change requests for the price amendments.

You are notified when the process is complete. The notification includes a link to the process log, where you can review any errors or warnings that occurred:

  • Errors can occur if any of the selected contracts cannot be amended because, for example, they already have a change request, they have usage records dated after the Effective from Date, or they have line items that use a pricing structure.
  • Warnings can occur if, for example, a contract has no line items requiring amendment, or if a renewal exists for a contract that has been amended so the unit prices on the renewal might need reviewing.

You must apply the change requests to the active contracts for the price amendments to take effect. The new prices are charged when you start billing the contracts after the Effective from Date.

Optimizing the Volume of Contracts That Can Be Amended in Bulk

In the Background Process Settings custom setting, the Amend Prices for Contracts: Queue Size and Amend Prices for Contracts: Scope Size fields determine how Billing Central handles the volume of contracts for bulk price amendment. The default values for both the queue size and scope size fields is 200 which means that a queue will process 200 contracts in one execution context. For an explanation of queue size and scope size, see Queueable Apex.

When amending contracts in bulk via the API, we have found that Billing Central (when not using any customizations) can handle 5000 contracts with 10 lines each, and that a scope size of 400 usually works for contracts with 10 lines. You might need to reduce the scope size to process larger contracts. For example, if your contracts typically have 1000 lines, try reducing the scope size to 3 or lower. The exact number of contracts that Billing Central can handle will vary depending on whether any customizations are implemented in your org, the size and complexity of your contracts, and platform limits. A scope size of 1 will give the most flexibility for large contracts with additional customizations, but it might still be possible to exceed platform limits. If this happens, start with smaller contracts and if possible split a large commercial contract into several smaller billing contracts.

If you experience difficulties when amending contracts in bulk from the list view, try selecting fewer contracts. For example, instead of selecting 200 contracts in the list view, try selecting 50 or fewer.

For further advice, contact Certinia Customer Support.