Decision notes
Renewal is the real test of a project
A project is judged on the first sale and paid for a year later. Why renewal exposes everything that was left out, and how to test it beforehand.
How claims are labelled
Why it shows up there
A new sale starts from a blank page: you choose, configure, discount, sign. A renewal starts from what the customer already holds — so the tool has to know what they hold, at what price, with which discounts, and since when.
Each of those four facts is produced at sale time. If one was approximated, it does not show immediately. It shows at renewal, on an invoice, at a customer.
The three symptoms, worst first
- The renewal comes out higher than the running contract. The engine started from list price and lost the discounts on the way. A customer always notices, and they call.
- The uplift is applied nowhere, or twice. Either the rate never reaches the price, or it stacks on a list increase that already went through.
- Someone digs out the old quote to check. The quietest symptom, and the most expensive: you pay every year for work the tool was meant to do.
What has to be decided, and by whom
One question, and it is not a technical one: does a renewal start from today’s list price, or from what the customer pays today?
- From list price. Your price increases pass through automatically and stack on the uplift. Easy to explain internally, sometimes hard to explain to a customer.
- From the net paid. The customer keeps their price, plus the uplift. Gentler commercially, and it requires the tool to genuinely know what they paid.
That decision belongs to sales leadership and finance. It is not a setting, and delegating it to the integrator means leaving it to chance.
How to test it before you sign
Three minutes, and it takes no knowledge of the tool.
- Take a real contract. With its discounts and its exceptions — not the demo one.
- Ask them to renew it in front of you. From the button, typing nothing by hand.
- Compare the amount. With what the customer pays today, plus the agreed uplift. To the cent.
If the gap is not zero, ask to be shown at which step the amount changed. The tool can say. If nobody shows you, nobody is looking.
What that looks like technically, step by step: when the pricing procedure ignores your Renew lines and indexing renewals without code.
What to take away
- Renewal tests everything the first sale left approximate. It arrives a year too late to be an acceptable surprise.
- “From list price or from the net paid” is a leadership decision, not a setting.
- An acceptance test fits in three gestures: a real contract, a renewal from the button, a comparison to the cent.
A note on this article?
A correction, different behaviour on your org, a question left open: it is useful, and it gets fixed.