Symptoms
A customer (or a Provider on a customer's behalf) places an upgrade or downgrade order for their subscription to upgrade or downgrade resources, switch the Service Plan, or change the subscription period.
However, order provisioning fails with the error message Seems concurrent Billing Order was processed, please cancel this order. The error message can be seen in the Parallels Business Automation (PBA) Provider Control Panel on the Provisioning Items tab in the failed order properties:
Cause
In PBA 5.4.8, the mechanism preventing concurrent processing of upgrade/downgrade and billing orders was implemented. This was done to avoid double-charging for resources.
A conflicting situation may happen in the following cases:
Case A: A customer places an upgrade order for their subscription and does not pay for it immediately. Later, PBA generates and processes the billing order. The customer then pays for the upgrade order and PBA tries to process it. In this case, PBA processes the billing order between the moment when the upgrade order is placed and the time when it is paid/processed.
- Case B: A customer places an upgrade/downgrade order for their subscription and pays for it immediately. Order provisioning fails and the order stays in the Provisioning Failed (PF) status for some time. While the upgrade/downgrade order is sitting in the PF status, PBA generates and processes a billing order for the subscription. Later, the Provider solves the problem with the customer's upgrade/downgrade order provisioning and tries to process it once again. Again, in this case, PBA processes the billing order between the moment of time when the upgrade order is placed and the time when it is processed.
You can see the billing order that was created/completed after the day the upgrade/downgrade order was placed and before the day it was processed. The billing orders that correspond to the subscription may be found in the PBA Provider Control Panel at Operation Director > Support Manager > Subscriptions > (Select subscription) > Orders tab.
However, there may be situations when there is no billing order that satisfies the above-described conditions in the PBA Control Panel, for example when a subscription is billed by a zero-balanced billing order. Zero-balanced billing orders have a total amount of zero (due to an applied promotion, 100-percent-off discount, or because a recurring fee of zero is set for the subscription and resource overusage is absent). Such orders are not invoiced and are not displayed in the Provider Control Panel, nor in the Customer Control Panel. Zero-balanced billing orders can only be found in the PBA database.
Resolution
Cancel the conflicting upgrade/downgrade order and place a new one.
In future versions of PBA, the above-described behavior will be changed and zero-balanced billing orders will not affect the processing of other orders.
The Provider may configure PBA to always show billing orders in the Control Panel (even if they are zero-balanced). Do this by setting the Show zero price option for all zero fees in Service Plans. In this case, PBA will generate regular billing orders instead of zero-balanced ones, and they will be seen in the Provider Control Panel and Customer Control Panel.
See Also
A specific case where a cancellation order fails and a billing date is set in the future is described in KnowledgeBase article #121224