Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

Reoccuring Billing & One Off Billings in the same account

In Business Central recurring billing / subscription contracts, is it expected behaviour that contract updates (e.g. line changes, amount, frequency) are blocked or rejected while a contract has an active billing proposal or unposted invoices?

If so:

Is best practice to post billing immediately to minimise this window?
Or are there supported patterns for handling upstream changes from Dynamics 365 CE / Dataverse while billing is in progress?

Practical example

We have an upcoming one-off appeal in ~2 weeks, but the majority of the supporters we would contact already have recurring subscriptions.

We want to:

run a one-off charge or appeal-related invoice,
without disrupting their normal recurring billing cycle, and
without creating a situation where CE updates fail or billing lines are missed because contracts are “locked” by recurring billing.

To me it seems to be very inefficient that the system cannot handle different options od donation handling at the same time.

How do others handle this scenario in BC?

Hello,

Yes, this is expected standard behavior in Business Central: when a recurring contract has an active billing proposal or unposted invoices, BC intentionally locks contract lines (amounts, frequency, dates) to prevent inconsistencies between the contract and what’s being billed. Best practice is to post billing proposals quickly to keep the lock window short and to treat recurring contracts as a stable baseline, handling one-off charges (like appeals or special donations) outside the contract via separate sales invoices/orders. For CE/Dataverse integrations, most implementations queue or defer contract updates until billing completes or apply them effective in the next billing period. Trying to mutate contracts while billing is in progress isn’t supported by design—BC favors billing integrity over concurrent flexibility—so separating recurring billing from ad-hoc charges is how most partners handle this cleanly in production.

Regards,
Oussama Sabbouh

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