Plan

📗What is a plan in Zenskar?

📗

Definition

A plan in Zenskar is a reusable blueprint that encapsulates the commercial structure of your product or service offering. It serves as a standardized template for creating contracts, especially when your business offers similar pricing and feature configurations to multiple customers.

Plans allow you to define phases, pricing models, products, and features such as discounts, taxes, and payment terms, all in one place. Once a plan is created, it can be reused to generate multiple contracts efficiently—ensuring consistency and saving time.

graph TD
  Plan["📄 Plan"]
  Phase["📆 Phase"]
  Product["📦 Product"]
  Feature["✨ Feature (e.g., Tax, Discount)"]

  Plan -->|"Includes one or more"| Phase
  Phase -->|"Contains one or more"| Product
  Phase -->|"Contains one or more"| Feature

style Plan fill:#90ee90,color:#000

🧩 Why use a plan instead of reusing a contract?

You might wonder: if contracts contain all the billing and revenue logic, why not just reuse the contract instead of creating a plan?

The answer lies in the nature of what contracts and plans represent:

📝 Contracts are customer-specific

• A contract is tied to a specific customer.
• It contains metadata like the customer name, unique terms, activation dates, and billing history.
• It might include exceptions or customized terms that don’t apply to others.
• Contracts are operational documents that interact with the billing and revenue engines.

Reusing a contract would risk exposing private data or creating inconsistencies.

🏗️ Plans are templates

• A plan is not linked to any specific customer.
• It’s a generalized and reusable template used to spin up contracts quickly.
• Plans hold the standard configuration of how you sell—such as which products are sold in which phase, default pricing, discounts, and tax treatments.

In short:

Plan = Blueprint for commercial logic
Contract = Customer-specific application of that blueprint

🔁 How plans work in Zenskar

1. Create a plan: Define one or more phases, assign products and features, and set up commercial rules.
2. Import a plan: When creating a new contract, import the plan. Zenskar populates the contract with the structure defined in the plan.
3. Customize as needed: After importing, the contract can be further customized for the specific customer.

🔍 Example: SaaS subscription plan

Suppose your company offers a software subscription:

• Plan name: Premium annual plan
• Phases: One phase that lasts for 12 months
• Product: Access to premium software suite
• Features: 10% discount, annual billing, tax via Avalara

This plan can be used to create contracts for multiple customers. Each contract will inherit the structure but contain individual customer details and billing.

🔗 Relationship to other concepts

• Plans contain phases
• Phases contain products and features
• Contracts are created from plans, but plans are independent of any specific contract

✅ Summary

Plans in Zenskar help standardize and scale your commercial operations by acting as templates for contracts. They separate the reusable commercial logic from the customer-specific agreement, ensuring a clean, consistent, and efficient billing and revenue setup.