We are looking for 3rd party SuiteApps to help us with contract renewals processing inside Netsuite. We already looked at the Netsuite Contract Renewals module, but we would like to see other applications. We have Hardware, Software and Professional services contracts. I will appreciate any information you can share.

Hi - As a general practice, do you have flexible renewal end dates (contract items do not have to co-term) or inflexible renewal end dates (contract items have to co-term if they are to be counted as a single contract)? NS Contract renewals is sufficient good for the latter, even if you have hardware, PS, along with Software. There are other 3rd party apps in the suiteapp.com marketplace but you will have to be careful because are supported by 3rd parties and support comes from these dev shops. Also make sure they are NS certified "Built for NetSuite" SuiteApps. A quick search there on "Contracts" only gave me 360 Contract Billing as an option but this is really for recurring billing management, which is only the Software part of your business. since you have hardware and ps potentially associated with your contract, you will need the ability to merge these performance obligations and manage Rev Allocation across all of them. This is more of an ARM requirement but should not be hindered by your Contract Renewals selection.

Hi @mescalante , we bought the contract renewals module and it was a epic failure for us. The company I work for has Software, Hardware and Professional services to manage. We are currently reviewing SuiteBilling. It seems better to manage changes i.e up sell, down sell within the contract period and also, price changes during the period. For example, year 2 charge X price. We had 2 demo’s and it seems better than the contact renewals module. The one downfall so far is there is no CPI feature. It needs to be done through CSV upload.

@Rachael - I do not know the specifics of why your company was not able to use CR to manage in period upsells and down sells as those are typically Sales order or return authorizations associated with the same contract. It does force you to co-term, which can be a deal breaker for some selling models. As for Hardware and PS, yes, contract renewals might not be the best. Our NS rep has told us that while CR is not going away soon, they will not be actively pushing it. SuiteBilling is the engine of the future for in-NS recurring billing engine. It is still in its infancy and works with ARM in a totally different way (i.e. it will create its own arrangements aside from Sales Orders) so I'd caution you to drill deeper during your demos with NS Sales. It's also very expensive as NS bills you for % of business done using Suitebilling rather than the traditional fixed annual licensing/module fee (*citation needed). Either way, it is difficult to determine the best course of action. We abandoned CR in NS and started to use SFDC CPQ for tracking SFT contracts and renewals. It's not perfect but seems to fit our (ever changing) selling models. Not the most popular option in this channel but sometimes NetSuite isn't the best solution to support certain business strategies or capabilities.

Thank you for adding comment. We tried with a NetSuite partner to get the contract management tool to work but it just wasn’t a good fit for our company. We couldn’t get our scenarios to work. We spent a good 10months working on it. I wasn’t aware that you need ARM for suitebilling, I need to flag this. We don’t currently use this! And that’s, one of the reasons we couldn’t use Contracts so easily. Our account manager told us, the charge for SuiteBilling was just the base price of the module no additional. She even gave us a commercial figure for this. We were told the biggest cost is the implementation. We were stunned by this because Zuora on the other hand charge based on our org’s revenue. Therefore, the more you grow. The more you pay! Plus, the implementation cost. In terms of Salesforce. Our org was created to be a very high level product listing. So we would have to re-design system and start using quotes, if we wanted to go that route. I’m going to the SuiteConnect event in London next week, so it will be interesting to see what they have to say about SuiteBilling. It’s only coming to Europe now and we would be one of the early adopters.