Microsoft has recently announced functionality called Coterminosity into the New Commerce Experience, effective 3/18/22. This is pretty big news for MSPs as it greatly reduces operational complexity at a per customer level. In this article, I will be breaking apart what this means for you from a billing and management perspective.
Before Coterminosity
Before this policy was instituted, subscription renewals were looking like they were going to be a nightmare. Essentially, you had a disparate renewal date on a per subscription basis depending on when you upgraded legacy products into NCE or ordered NCE net new. This means that potentially, you could have many different renewal dates on a per customer level.
This obviously is not optimal, especially when we talk about add-ons having a different renewal date than base plans. Managing these renewals and accommodating for this in PSA tools was going to be extremely complex.
New Updates
Coterminosity allows you to align all of the subscriptions under a customer to a single renewal date, no matter the term. The following example will give more clarity:
Key Takeaways:
- Charges are prorated accordingly based off the first subscription renewal. i.e. Subscription B above is prorated from July 17 to May 2.
- You can have more than one coterminous date for customer’s subscriptions if you wanted to mix this up (don’t know why you would but it is available)
- Co-termination applies to both add-ons and base products
- More granular details can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/align-subscription-end-dates
Unsupported Scenarios
Coterminosity will not support the following scenarios:
- Add a seat to an existing subscription (meaning you cannot reset your renewal when you increment seats)
- Upgrading a seat to a new or existing subscription
- Mid-term adjustments of subscription durations (meaning if you moved to 1 year to 3 year for instance)
- Adjustment of subscription end dates after Coterminosity is turned on
- Having the same end dates across customer tenants
How to start using Coterminosity
CSP1 => Leverage the partner center documentation referenced above to start using APIs or the user interface to select Co-terminus dates.
Indirect Resellers => If you are working with a distributor, its possible they do not support this functionality just yet. When they do, active NCE subscriptions cannot be retroactively set to be co-terminus. All net new subscription would be eligible once the functionality is added. Its likely the distributor will perform the opting in of co-terms on the backend or they will give you a selection to do so on the front-end when purchasing the subscription.