For the standard Clone behavior of a Sales Agreement, Salesforce creates the cloned agreement in Draft status and uses the same Start Date as the original Sales Agreement. Salesforce's current Sales Agreement considerations explicitly document both behaviors.
Standard cloning does not copy the original products and schedules. This distinction matters because Manufacturing Cloud now also provides a separate Deep Clone capability. Deep Clone can copy products, pricing, schedules, custom attributes, and related data into a new independent Sales Agreement. Therefore, the administrator must distinguish between ordinary Sales Agreement cloning and the newer Deep Clone function.
A normally cloned agreement is not automatically Activated because it must proceed through the appropriate Sales Agreement lifecycle, including completion of its configuration and any required approval process. Draft status allows users to modify the cloned record before progressing it through that lifecycle.
Accordingly, for the standard cloning operation described in the question, the accurate characteristics are that the new agreement starts in Draft and inherits the original agreement's Start Date.
Study Guide references/topics: Configure and Build — Sales Agreements; Clone; Deep Clone; Sales Agreement Lifecycle; Draft Status.
