Subscriptions

A subscription is not a repeating invoice. It is a price that changes while the clock is running, and the interesting question is what happens when it changes mid-month.

The pieces

• Plans — a price, an interval, and what it includes. Monthly or yearly.
• Add-ons — priced per unit, with a quantity that can change.
• Trials — a number of days before the first charge.
• Coupons — a percentage or a fixed amount, for a number of periods or forever. A coupon can never take the total below zero.

Changing mid-period

Upgrade a subscription on the 10th of a 30-day month and the customer is credited for the unused 20 days of the old plan and charged for 20 days of the new one. Both are worked out from the real period, not from a notional 30-day month, so February behaves like February.

What the nightly run does

For each subscription that is due: price the period, issue the invoice, then advance the period. In that order, deliberately — if the run dies after issuing, the next run finds an invoice already covering that period and does nothing, rather than billing it again.

Whether the invoice is issued with a number, sent to the customer, and charged to a saved card are three separate switches in Settings → Subscriptions. You can have all of it automatic, or none.

One invoice or several

A customer with three subscriptions can get one consolidated invoice or three. Consolidated is the default — three invoices on the same day from the same supplier is how accounts payable departments lose one of them.

When payment fails

Dunning takes over: reminders on the days you configure, retries for temporary failures, a hard stop for permanent ones. See charging cards for what counts as which.

Cancelling

At the end of the period or immediately. At period end, the customer keeps what they paid for — cancelling a yearly plan in month two does not switch it off in month two unless you choose that.

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