Renewal Tickets documentation

Requirements

• A Freshservice or Freshdesk account on a plan that includes Marketplace applications. The same application works in both products; it follows the product it is installed in.
• The API key of an administrator. In Freshservice the key must be able to read contracts, vendors, groups and agents and create tickets or changes; in Freshdesk it must be able to read companies, contacts, their fields, groups and agents and create tickets.
• For Freshdesk: the date fields you want to watch. The built-in company Renewal date is offered when your account has it, together with your own company and contact fields of the date type.

Installation

The installation page asks for your account subdomain (acme for acme.freshservice.com or acme.freshdesk.com) and the API key, and both must pass Verify before installation completes. The key is stored as a Freshworks secure installation parameter: the platform attaches it to outbound request headers and it is never exposed to the browser.

Enabled is off after installation. Leave it off until the preview shows what you expect, then tick it in the application's settings (Admin, Marketplace apps, edit the application's settings).

Using it

• Open Renewal Tickets from the apps menu. Under Settings choose the thresholds, the account time zone (it decides what today is), what to watch and the ticket template: group, agent, priority, subject and description. Freshservice also asks whether to create an Incident or a Change, and who the requester is; Freshdesk asks for a requester email address for company tickets.
• Placeholders: {{name}}, {{end_date}}, {{contract_number}}, {{vendor}} and {{cost}}. A line of the description whose placeholders are all empty for a record (a Freshdesk company has no contract number) is left out.
• Preview: reads your records and lists each ticket that would be created, with its subject, and counts the records that are filtered out, not due yet, already handled or already ended. Nothing is created.
• Run now: type CREATE and run. The same rules as the daily scan apply.
• Run log: download a CSV of the latest run.

How dates and thresholds work

• An end date counts as a calendar day: the time and zone stored with it are ignored, and only today is taken in the time zone you set.
• A record is due when the days left are at or below a threshold. Only the closest threshold reached is due; earlier ones are not created afterwards. An end date in the past creates nothing.
• With Repeat every year, a past date moves forward to the same day and month of the next year (29 February becomes 28 February in other years), so the record is due again every year.
• A ticket is never created twice for the same record, threshold and end date. If the end date changes, the new date is treated as a new renewal.

Limits you should know

• The application makes at most 40 requests per minute, and they count against your account's API limit. A long scan stops before the platform's time limit, remembers where it was and continues a few minutes later.
• The daily scan runs once a day while the application is switched on. Run now and Preview read the records at once.
• Freshdesk applies its own notification settings to the tickets the application creates. For contact date fields, the contact is the requester and may be emailed about the new ticket, as for any other ticket.
• Every ticket gets the tag renewal-tickets, so you can find and report on them.