Update a Product on Subscription with a Future-dated Remove with Orders enabled

[ASchwarz]

As soon as you cancel a subscription or remove a product with a future contract effective date you are not able to update it as it is not shown anymore when creating a new order. 

To effectively update such a product you would need to delete the order and create a new one to get the changes effective. But you can only delete orders if no other order was created afterwards. So sometimes we need to redo a lot of orders to apply a change to one specific item. 

With amandements this was possible as you can see in this article: 

https://knowledgecenter.zuora.com/BC_Subscription_Management/Subscriptions/E_Changing_Subscriptions_...

This feature would be really helpful as subscriptions often change and we cannot always go with the described workaround and delete orders as usually with an order an invoice is created and then we even need to cancel invoices to proceed which is definetly not the correct way. 

[christopherduke]

We've backed ourselves into a corner once or twice also w/ the limitations around cancelled subscriptions. 

[ASchwarz]

@christopherduke did you find a workaround? 

[christopherduke]

In one case we deleted the invoice, had Zuora Support apply a "data fix" to unlock the charge segment, and deleted the order containing the cancellation.

The other case was messier where we had a user attempt to correct their data entry error (incorrect cancellation effective date in the future) by creating subsequent orders on top (creating new subscriptions). Because there was a credit card payment applied to the resulting invoice we were unable to delete the invoice or the orders. We cancelled the additional subscriptions effective on their respective start dates (completely negating them) and are now waiting for the originally-cancelled subscription to lapse where a new future-dated subscription we created will pick up. We were lucky that other than the cancellation date, the original subscription was correct and that our downstream systems still provision the appropriate products. Unsure how we'd process any type of subscription change for this account in the meantime though, crossing our fingers that none are needed.

[ASchwarz]

Hi @christopherduke thanks for the input. 

I found a workaround for this problem by using the api to update the produtc. 

https://de.zuora.com/developer/api-reference/#operation/POST_Order

This is nothing our service colleagues are able to do but it avoids the messy way you described.