How to Use Contract Price Expiration Triggers
While everyone wants to get their orders signed and approved by clients, you don’t want an order to be signed that can’t be delivered or was sitting out there for months. There is a setting that can be enabled on your contract templates called Price Expiration Period, which will un-approve an order once the chosen timeframe has passed – preventing the customer from signing an order that cannot be fulfilled. One of the timeframes that can be chosen is the ‘Initial Material Due Date’, which means the contract pricing will expire when the earliest material due date on the order is reached. This functionality only works for orders that are at the 90%, or publisher, approval level.
Set-Up
Price expirations are set on a contract template basis. To set this up, navigate to Settings > Templates > Contracts and add or edit a contract template. On the template edit page, in the upper right corner there is a Settings icon. Click on the icon to open a popup where you can enable the price expiration feature. Choose a time frame for the ‘Price Expiration Period’ field, and make sure to click Save.
If you leave the Price Expiration Period field to none, then any orders using that contract template will never expire and it is up to the Sales Rep to delete the order. Otherwise, a customer can execute the order at any time.
Setting the Price Expiration Period field to 1, 2, 7, 14,15, 30, or 60 days means that the contract will expire a set number of days after it is created.
If you use the period Initial Material Due Date then there is not a set number of days that will cause the contract to expire. Instead, the order will expire when the earliest material due date on the order is reached. This functionality prevents orders from being signed if they are past their material due date, and therefore cannot be delivered. The Initial Material Due Date option is the most flexible and considers the products on each order.
Similar to the Initial Material Due Date option, the Initial Delivery Date option does not expire contracts after a set number of days. Instead, the order will expire when the earliest delivery date on the order is reached. This prevents orders from being signed if they are past their delivery dates. This option also considers the products on each order.
Any order created using the contract template with price expirations will use the price expiration period that is set on that template.
How it Works
A contract must fit certain criteria for the contract to expire, even if it uses a template with a price expiration configuration. The contract will only expire if it is a pending order at 90%, or Organization/Publisher, approved.
There are two notifications that get sent out when a contract is set to expire: one prior to the contract expiring, and one after.
The Expiring notification gets sent 5 days prior to the contract expiring. The date the contract is expiring is based on the price expiration period set on the template. If you have a template set to use the 1 or 2 day expirations, no notification will be sent ahead of time.If you have a template set to use the 1 or 2 day expirations, no notification will be sent ahead of time.
Note
The days before the Expiring notification is be sent cannot be edited, it will always be five days before the expiration.
The Expired notification is sent one day after the contract has expired, as another reminder to the order rep.
The price expiration feature considers the Work Week system configuration, and whether it is set to 5 days or 7.
If the configuration is set to 5 days, then the notification’s calculation will skip weekends. For example, if you have a product whose material due date is on Wednesday April 21st, then the Expiring notification will be sent out on Wednesday April 14th, which is 5 weekdays prior to the material due date, skipping weekend days.
If the configuration is set to 7 days, then the calculation includes weekends. For instance, using the April 21st example again, the Expiring notification will be sent out on Friday April 16th, which is 5 days prior to the material due date, and includes the weekend days.
Note
The Expiring and Expired emails can get sent out on weekend days even with the 5 day work week configuration. The 5 day work week considers weekend days when calculating the material due date. However, let’s say you have a contract that expired on a Friday. Both the 5 day and 7 day work weeks will send out the Expired notification that Saturday, which is one day after the expiration.
When a contract expires, it will be reverted from 90% complete to an incomplete order, and it will require reviewing and re-saving the order, and a new Publisher approval before it can be sent to the client.
Price Expiration on Initial Material Due Date
When you use the Initial Material Due Date as the Price Expiration Period, the contract will expire at the earliest material due date on the order. There are a handful of configurations that can affect each product’s material due date.
Issue material due date
If there are no offsets configured for your products, then print and digital ads by default will use the issue level material due date. You can find your issue dates by navigating to Settings > Products > Publication & Issue Setup. Use the ellipsis to click the Manage Issues action and edit a specific issue to view its dates.
System offset date
You can enable a material due date offset for all your system’s digital products. If this is enabled, it will override the issue material due date for your digital ads, and the default material due dates of your digital media items. To set this up, navigate to Settings > Products > System Configurations. Set the configuration ‘Digital material date offset’ to yes and enter a value in the configuration ‘Digital material date offset period’. The second configuration will determine how many days prior to the delivery date that the material due date will be.
Product offset dates
There are ways to set offsets on individual products, rather than at a system-wide level. The approach to enable this varies depending on the type of product.
For digital ads, navigate to Settings > Products > Rate Card & Ad Setup. Here, go to the Sizes tab, and edit a digital ad size. In the popup there is a field for Offset Days. The value entered here is the number of days prior to the issue’s material due date that the reminders will be sent.
Digital media products have their offsets set on the product level, not the size. Go to the Settings > Products > Impressions, Slots, or Targeted Display product pages, and add or edit a product. On the edit page for each of these product types, there is a field for Reminder Offset Days.
The way the material due date is determined varies slightly depending on the type of product, in addition to your system’s offset configurations.
Print Ads - The material due date for print ads is based on its issue’s material due date.
Digital Ads - Digital ads will either use their issue’s material due date, or will use the system offset date, or the ad size’s offset. If there is an ad size or system offset, that will override the issue’s material due date.
Digital Media - Digital media products use their delivery dates by default. If there is a product level offset or a system level offset, those will override the delivery date that is set on the line item.
Price Expiration on Initial Delivery Date
When you use the Initial Delivery Date as the Price Expiration Period, the contract will expire at the earliest delivery date on the order. The way the delivery date is determined varies depending on the type of product.
Print Ads - The delivery date for print ads is based on the reporting date of the issue.
Digital Ads - If the line item has a manual start date assigned, that will be used as the delivery date. If no manual start date is set, then the issue's reporting date will be used.
Digital Media - All digital media product types use their Start Run Dates as the delivery date.
Services and Events - If there is an Event (Start) date set on the line item, that will be used as the delivery date. If there is no Event (Start) date specified, then the Due (End) date will be used instead.
Updated 9/9/2025