Dear AdvantageCS Client:

The following is a brief description of Advantage features added or changed with the September 2025 update. For more information, see the Advantage Feature Overview or the individual feature summaries below.

Advantage 2025.9 Features

The following is a brief description of Advantage features added or changed with update 2025.9. For a description of Advantage table-related changes between updates 2025.8 and 2025.9, please see the Advantage schema report available on the AdvantageCS Support downloads page.

System-Level Features

CDS910 Destination Monitor Server Runtime Parameter: The Copy Advantage Database to Another Area process (CDS910) is used to copy an existing Advantage database for use in another Advantage area. This is particularly useful during the implementation phase of a project when data needs to be transferred between areas (e.g., setup to conversion, conversion to acceptance, setup to development). When run, CDS910 copies the database of the current Advantage implementation to the Destination Area Code specified at runtime. It then resets area-specific data, such as process requests, monitor queue ownership, and deferred commands. With this update, to better support organizations running in multi-server environments, a new optional “Destination Monitor Server” runtime parameter allows users to define the monitor server for the destination area.

REST API

REST Returns Number of BCL Suspension Shipments To Be Skipped: The Product Subscriptions and Collections module (BCL) enables you to offer continuity programs, where customers receive a series of related products delivered sequentially over time. Advantage’s REST API provides BCL participation via two GET methods: GET /book-club-participations and GET /book-club-participations/{clubParticipationId}. With this update, a new property, RemainingShipmentsToSkipForSuspension, has been added to help external systems better manage suspended BCL participants. For a customer in suspended status, this property specifies how many upcoming shipments will be skipped during the suspension.

Add or Replace Components in REST Agreement Renewals: The Advantage REST API makes it easy to integrate with Advantage using standard HTTP methods. One of its key endpoints, POST /agreements/{agreementId}/renew, lets you renew existing agreements. With this update, agreement renewals in REST are more flexible: new components can be added or replaced. To support this, a new ComponentCreateRequests property has been added to the AgreementRenewalOptions model. This property allows external systems to pass a list of components (PRO, CIR, or AMB) to be included in the renewed agreement.

Amount Applied Property Added to REST: In Advantage, credit applications link all or part of a credit to a specific debit on an order. With this update, to make this information available in REST, a new AmountApplied property has been added to multiple endpoints. This property, which is shown in the credit’s billing currency, is returned on the OrderPayment model to show the amount of the payment applied to the order (including posted and unposted applications), and on the Credit model to show the amount of the credit applied to the agreement or subscription (null in other contexts). In addition, as part of this update, the logic used to populate RelatedDebits and RelatedCredits has been refined to ensure only truly related transactions are included.

Filters Added to Promotion Search Endpoint: The Advantage REST API is a web service API designed following REST principles, which is based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Promotion controller enables external systems to create new promotions and update existing ones. With this update, filters have been added to the promotion search endpoint (GET /promotions), allowing external systems to narrow results when retrieving promotions.

Agreement Management and Billing (AMB)

AMB410 Multistream Support: Advantage’s AMB410 process is used for agreement income recognition. It calculates the amount of income that can be recognized for agreements and produces the AMB410 report, which details the access points, agreement data, financial amounts, and earned income for each access point. The process involves deferring access income when agreements are established, recognizing income proportionally over the active period, and creating journal entries to debit deferral accounts and credit earned income accounts at month-end. With this update, to improve AMB410 performance and reduce runtime, a new “Number of Streams” runtime option has been added, allowing the process to run in multiple streams.

REST and UI Agreement Renewal Matching with AMB/DEFORDBY Option: The AMB/DEFORDBY system option, when enabled, defaults the order-by customer on agreements to the ship-to customer. In this case, the system uses the ship-to customer and address from the order line as the default order-by customer on the agreement. Agreement renewal matching is the logic that identifies an existing agreement to renew instead of creating a new one. Previously, this matching logic was not being applied consistently between REST renewals and UI scenarios. Therefore, with this update, agreement renewal logic has been updated so that ship-to information is used for renewal matching policies only when the AMB/DEFORDBY system option is enabled. This ensures consistent behavior across both UI and REST renewals.

Accounts Receivable (ARP)

Improved Effort Identification in Customer Activity Statements: In Advantage, statements are customer communications that summarize multiple invoices or transactions, rather than addressing each one individually. This is especially useful for commercial customers or those with high transaction volume. Customer Activity Statements (CDS319) group a customer’s complete order activity, including orders, renewals, cancellations, returns, and payments, under a single statement ID for analysis, service, and payment application. For organizations that use more than nine ARP319 statement efforts, the sequence continues with alphabetic characters for distribution (DST) after numeric efforts 1 through 9. As a result, customers may see an alphabetic character on their statements. With this update, identifying the customer-facing effort number in Customer Activity Statements has been improved. In the ARPSTT Statement Summary and Statement Effort dialogs and list frames, users who see numeric effort values (e.g., 10, 11, 12) instead of the customer-facing alphabetic values (e.g., A, B, C) will now see the alphabetic value displayed in parentheses after the numeric value (e.g., 10 (A)).

Product Subscriptions and Collections (BCL)

Late Notification Response Tracking for Product Subscriptions: Product Subscription Notifications are optional mailings that can be sent to customers prior to a shipment to inform them of the pending delivery, with configurable wait days for responses. Once these notifications are set up, customers may occasionally respond after the configured waiting period has elapsed. With this update, a new “Late Notification Response” field is automatically populated when a response arrives after the waiting period. The field appears in both the Club Member and Club Release Information dialogs, providing clearer tracking and auditing of customer replies. In addition, the existing Notify/Load-Up Response action has been added to the Club Member dialog, making it easier to update responses from prior releases. When submitting responses through Omnistream (OSM) or the Advantage REST API, both the customer’s response and the response date must be provided, and the system records if the response is late.

Business Intelligence (BI)

BI Deployment and Upgrade Enhancements: The Advantage Business Intelligence (BI) module provides a fast way to access usable analytic data from Advantage. Using the report templates supplied with BI, you can create pivot tables to “slice” Advantage metrics and data in ways that are most meaningful to your business. Data flows from the Advantage database into the warehouse database, executed through the CDS370 – Populate Business Intelligence and CDS371 – Deploy Business Intelligence processes. With this update, the CDS370 and CDS371 processes have been enhanced to simplify BI deployment and upgrades. First, the CDS370 process options have been streamlined to reduce the number of steps required for setup and maintenance. Additionally, BI warehouse tables are now defined and upgraded through CDS371 using the Advantage upgrade framework. Similar to Advantage’s quantum upgrades, CDS371 creates a separate upgrade database, validates it, and then replaces the existing warehouse to ensure that all tables, views, and objects are fully up to date. These enhancements make BI deployment simpler and fully align it with Advantage’s upgrade framework.

Eva Johnson

Technical Writer