Submit Your Suggestions for Vista

How many regular charges occur on your bank account, where you know you'll only pay X more of them?

...Besides loan payments?

Now, how many do you know that are active until you turn them off? (Netflix, utilities, Vista Cloud, AutoCAD, any Adobe Suite....etc)

As much as I hate the "turn everything into a subscription" model, I believe it has real value where physical services are performed.

The lack of the ability to EASILY set up an agreement/subscription like "Charge customer X every month for $ZZ until they cancel" in VISTA is troubling.

Viewpoint was ALMOST there with the 'non-expiring' agreement checkbox, but stopped short of implementing the remaining bits:

• Periodic Billing Pattern (Take a peek at the setup in SM Service :: Schedule tab to see what it should look like)

• Update HELP file to note that PRICE for non-expiring agreements refers to the REOCCURING bill price.

• Billings Due needs to be updated to generate these invoices.

• [Expiration Date] field in SM Agreements does not actually DISABLE when checking the [Non-Expiring] box. (and I'm sure a few other GUI changes to make things clear)

Basically, Viewpoint is CLOSE to having this done.

Why don't we use Auto-Renew? Turns out that's not implemented yet either, and would needlessly bump up the major revision number every billing cycle.

Why don't we set the EXPIRATION DATE to some far distant date (100 years out), then calculate the TOTAL, and generate the Billing Schedule?

• Viewpoint input date fields MESSES UP four digit years beyond 2050. Seriously. It's 23 years beyond y2k folks. Four digit years are not a new thing.

• Billing Schedule only allows 99 lines, so depending on the frequency, you might be able to go out only a few years, further complicating the math.

Do any other companies who use VP offer subscriptions? Does your method work smoothly?