Understand recurring revenue

Understand — Recurring Orders & Subscriptions.

"Recurring" covers four different mechanisms — replenishment, standing orders, subscriptions and service contracts — and they fail in different ways. Setting one up on the wrong mechanism is the mistake that costs money later: a stock-out that silently becomes an invoice, an open-ended delivery that outlives the contract, a prediction nobody agreed to.

Read these two before you configure anything. The first separates the four patterns and settles the two questions that belong in the contract rather than in a setting — who controls the schedule, and whether price is fixed at the start or resolved fresh at each run. The second is the arithmetic behind predicted reorders: where the consumption rate comes from, how much history you need before it means anything, and the four situations where it is confidently wrong.