New Features in SAP Subscription Billing (2021-03-17)

Welcome to our blog series about SAP Subscription Billing’s new features!

This week, one new feature made it into our delivery, and we’d also like to take the time to announce the deprecation of some of our APIs and apps with the aim of simplifying the subscription orchestration processes. Let’s take a look at what’s new:

Subscription deletion during migration and pre-production testing

When starting to use SAP Subscription Billing, customers sometimes need to migrate data from a previous subscription management platform. And this transition process can lead to errors.

As a response to this customer feedback, we developed APIs to delete subscriptions and the associated billing data during data migration and before productive use of SAP Subscription Billing. With this new capability, we now support the deletion of subscriptions when data is incorrectly migrated during the cutover of an implementation project (previously, you could only delete pending subscriptions).

If a subscription is deleted, any bill items for the subscription are automatically deleted from open bills. However, if the bills are already closed, an extra step is required to manually delete the bill items. The related data that was possibly already transferred through an integrated downstream application (e.g. invoicing system) must also be handled separately.

To delete subscriptions via the Subscriptions API, users need the new scope: subscription_delete (or the existing scope subscription_manage to delete only pending subscriptions)

To delete bill items in the Bills app, users need the new role: ui_bill_delete

To delete bill items via the Bills API, users need the new scope: bill_delete

Remark: The deletion of a subscriptions is not reversible, and leads to the deletion of all associated allowances, for this reason we recommend you use this new feature with caution.

Deprecation of orchestration functionality

During the last months, we’ve been gradually adding new functionality to our Subscriptions API and app to simplify the creation and orchestration of subscriptions so these processes can be managed in a single place.

As a result, we would like to announce that the following APIs are now deprecated and will be decommissioned in March 2022. No new features will be added to these APIs, therefore please use the recommended alternative functionality:

• Change Requests
  You can use the Subscriptions API (or the Subscriptions app) instead to change subscriptions.
• Orchestration Monitor
  You can use the Subscriptions API (or the Subscriptions app) instead to monitor the provisioning of subscriptions. For example, you can use the subscription status to find pending subscriptions.
• Technical Resources
  You can use subscription events to supply SAP Subscription Billing with technical resources from a technical system. You can consume the “created as pending” event to trigger the orchestration process and to set the subscription to Complete.
• Custom Activities
  You can use subscription events instead to trigger a custom activity. For example, you can use the “subscription created” and “subscription changed” events.

The following apps are also deprecated and will be retired in September 2021. Please use the recommended alternative functionality:

• Change Requests app
  You can use the Subscriptions app instead to check time-dependent changes to subscriptions in the subscription items.
• Orchestration Configuration app
  You can use a combination of pending subscriptions and subscription events to orchestrate the provisioning. For example, you can use the “created as pending” and “changed as pending” events to orchestrate the transition between a pending and an active subscription.

Thank you for reading today’s blog! 🚀

To not miss the next feature blogs, don’t forget to follow the tag SAP Subscription Billing. And in the meantime, you can find out more about our solution in the information section below.

Also: please like this post if you found it useful, and don’t hesitate to leave us your feedback in the comment section.

In case of questions, feel free to ask them in our Q&A section, using the tag SAP Subscription Billing.

Stay tuned, and stay safe !

Élodie

More information about SAP Subscription Billing

• Feature Overview
• What’s New for APIs and Events
• SAP Help Portal page