NetSuite Contract Renewals

About NetSuite Contract Renewals

The NetSuite Contract Renewals module helps businesses manage recurring revenue from ongoing licenses, support, or maintenance contracts. In order to achieve long-term health and success, software companies need to be able to optimize these recurring revenue streams. NetSuite provides the essential end-to-end functionality software companies require to manage their renewal business effectively. 

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Renewal Automation 

NetSuite's flexible and powerful automated renewal process helps software companies that offer perpetually licensed and term-licensed products, enabling companies to effectively manage recurring billing. NetSuite also enables customers to be able to automatically generate renewal transactions based on pre-defined timeframes, such as 30 days or 7 days before their software subscriptions expire. This ensures that renewals are handled promptly and that revenue opportunities aren't missed. It also streamlines workflow and reduces time, expense and risk. 

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Multi-Contract Management 

One of the many issues around renewals is managing the multiple transactions that typically occur with a customer over a year. Some of these may be one-time transactions for training or consulting, while others are annual contract renewals for new users, product and module licenses, or support and maintenance entitlements. NetSuite simplifies this process—for both the vendor and the customer—by allowing the termination of multiple transactions into a single contract with a single renewal. At the same time, multi-contract support provides additional flexibility when it may not be appropriate to terminate all items under a single agreement. This streamlined approach helps ensure maximum revenue during the renewal process. 

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Uplift and Discount Management 

Uplift and discounting are critical aspects of the contract renewal process. As a software company renews a customer, it may increase pricing based on a pre-defined price book or a standard across-the-board increase, or it may implement increases only for some customers or customer sets. Similarly, the company may extend discounts to select customers. A software company must be flexible to implement and customize uplifts and discounts across any range of customers; however, managing that process with spreadsheets introduces the risk of error, lost revenue, and customer dissatisfaction. NetSuite supplies features that allow companies to manage uplifts across the board or on a customer basis, while supporting granular discounting down to the individual transaction level.

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Revenue Recognition 

Another challenge for software companies is recognizing revenue from contract renewals. In most cases, revenue recognition follows the exact dates of the transactions, but sometimes revenue recognition needs to be handled separately (depending on transaction types and new FASB rules). This separation of revenue recognition often requires creating another process, increasing the time and workload for a renewal. The NetSuite Contract Renewals module solves this challenge by providing the flexibility to manage different dates for revenue recognition purposes. It allows the contract renewal and billing process to flow automatically, while the revenue recognition can follow another procedure.

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Reporting and Visibility 

NetSuite's real-time dashboards deliver visibility features that software companies need to optimize recurring revenue streams. Visual dashboards available in the NetSuite Contract Renewals module provide KPIs (key performance indicators) related to critical contracts, the renewal pipeline, and upsell opportunities. In addition, interactive drill-down and reporting provide your staff with the ability to perform granular analysis of customer and contract types.