There are ways to extend an allowance of maintenance / support time beyond their expiry. How this is done depends on whether or not the plan has a Renewal Frequency.

A plan with a renewal frequency will refresh its allowance of time at a set interval - e.g. providing 10 hours per month.

A plan without a renewal frequency will not refresh automatically.

In both cases, a plan service's expiry will determine when that plan expires and cannot be used.

To extend the validity of plan that does not refresh, you can edit the Expiry field on the asset. This can be reached from either the customer's Assets or Maintenance Plans tab.

If you are using the Cease Date field, you should update that too.

Maintenance plan assets with a renewal frequency should generally not be extended beyond their expiry. We recommend, instead, creating a new asset via a sales order.

However, there may be occasions where you would like to extend a maintenance plan by a relatively short period. For example, you may wish to offer a customer some more time to use remaining hours out of good will.

For example:

Customer has an annual plan, with 30 hours to be used throughout the year - period 01/01/20 to 31/12/20.

Above: contract expires 30/12/2020

Above: maintenance period and current allowance also expire on this day

Come 01/12/20, the customer still has 5 hours remaining. You decide to give them three months to use this time, at no charge.

There are two ways to do this.

You can either convert a new asset from sales order or create an asset directly, and populate the values as you wish.

You will need to select a maintenance plan type from the respective menu. In the below example I have selected a flexible plan type, which allows me to change the Maintenance Plan Qty (i.e. number of hours).

If you do not have a flexible plan type, you can use the same plan type as before and deduct hours from it to adjust.

The correct amount of time must be specified either way, as we have entered a new maintenance period.

This will mean that, come 01/01/21, a new maintenance period will be entered, with the full annual allowance. This will expire on 30/03/21.

In order to adjust the allowance, you should create a customer case against which to deduct time so that the allowance matches the remainder - in our case, log 25 hours. Remember to make sure that the Entry Date is within the new allowance period.

You may also wish to deduct the remaining hours from the previous allowance in order to balance out.