Hey all
What is the best efficient way to handle time based discount/coupon in Odoo 16 for subscriptions?
Use case:
Yearly subscription price: eg 200 EUR/year but first year only you get 20% discount.
So first year should invoice 160 EUR. Next year invoice should be 200 EUR.
If I enter the discount directly on the SO line discount, this becomes a permanent discount forever. Every subsequent next year invoice will have the 20% discount.
If I use the discount program and generate a coupon, the discount also stay permanently. Every subsequent next year invoice will have the coupon and apply 20% discount again.
Is there no simple way to apply a discount with the option to limit to eg 1 invoice cycle only? This is a very common practice with subscriptions that you get an onboarding discount.
Heck, even Odoo itself do this concept on their pricing page. New customers get a discount for first year only.
@Annika
Indeed, we solved it with a custom solution, but it's part of a much bigger suite of improvements in our custom module which is based on our own requirement and already ported it forward to v19.0.
We added a lot improvements to fix many gaps that Odoo still has in v19.0 as well:
* the ability to have time based discounts and "trials"
* added functionality to manage contractual periods alongside billing, eg a yearly contract with monthly billing, so clients can cancel yearly while keeping the subscription and billing active until the next contractual renewal. (same as Google, Adobe, ...).
https://shottr.cc/s/1X4E/SCR-20260223-l2mp.png
https://shottr.cc/s/1I7T/SCR-20260223-l36p.png
* ability to invoice subscriptions earlier, common used for prepaid services like hosting where you want customers to pay before the actual renewal to avoid costs at your vendors.
Odoo can't do this, without skewing the next invoice date wrong, so we have an independant scheduler that handles this where applicable as we just want to the invoice sent earlier, not changing the subscription next invoice date.
* self closing subscriptions y customers causes subscriptions to stop immediately even if they are in a yearly plan as example and not respecting contractual period, so your client suddenly no longer gets the invoices for remaining period.
We fixed this also by keeping the subscription running and another scheduler checks if the subscription can be closed on the contractual end date instead of next invoice date.
* manage multiple different frequencies from a single quotation. I don't want to sent 3 quotations for yearly domain/DNS, monthly server hosting and quarterly maintenance, and ask customers to sign and pay 3 individual quotes. So with our custom solution, we can sent 1 quotation with everything which automatically becomes 3 subscriptions when confirmed and splits as SO sequence-1, -2, -3, ...based on how many lines you have. If multiple lines have the same frequency, they stay together, it's only on the frequency we are splitting.
* managing price indexing for existing subscriptions, based on new product prices. I don't want to manually update thousands of SO lines with the new pricing.
So I can set my new price on my service products and pricelists with a start and end date just like any other products. And then a server action allows me to select which subscriptions need to index and set from which date the new price starts so the next invoice date or contract date renewal will update/upsell the subscription automatically based on the pricelist start/end date so clients pay the new indexed price when applicable.
* added a feature to allow for billing usage-based information from our Kubernetes clusters. Our metrics server exposes the data via OpenCost and each month my Odoo instance pulls that data and generates the invoice for the matching subscription from the real usage. https://opencost.io
* and a bunch of more smaller annoyances we improved over the last years.
It's not something we sell as a standalone as this is completely customized to our personal requirements, but we can always develop a personal variation based on your requirements.