Business to Business

Richard Haynes's Avatar

Richard Haynes

22 Jun, 2017 01:42 PM

Hi,

We have a lot of business subscribers, some of whom are particularly anxious about credit card payments. They don't want to be automatically billed. They would much rather have their service removed than accidentally be billed because they forgot to downgrade to the free plan before the billing date. If we were to help them achieve this default "removal of service" rather than "debit credit card" at the end of the billing period (usually a year for these guys), what are the options?

Thanks in advance,

Richard

  1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Meghan Turner on 23 Jun, 2017 04:59 PM

    Meghan Turner's Avatar

    Hi Richard,

    There are a couple of ways to achieve what you're trying to do, but keep in mind that the best option for you will depend on how your application decides if customers should be receiving your services. While Cheddar can give information related to your customer's subscription, it's up to your application to determine who should and should not have access to your platform.

    If your application removes services when a customer has canceled their subscription, you could use the subscription billable hook to cancel customer's subscription on annual plans before their invoice runs. The subscription billable hook fires when an invoice becomes due, but before it's transacted, so that gives your application the opportunity to make changes to the invoice or customer record right before a transaction was scheduled to take place (find more info on CG's web hooks in this article).

    For your particular use case, the subscription billable hook would fire when a customer's invoice becomes due, your hook listener would receive a subscription billable hook, the listener would determine if that customer should be canceled rather than charged, then cancel the customer's subscription if needed.

    This method would allow you to continue to use the bill reminder emails to let customers know they have a bill coming up, then use the subscription canceled email to have them reactivate their subscription if they'd like to continue using your service.

    If you don't want the customer to be canceled, you have the option to put them on a non-recurring pricing plan. Customers who are subscribed to a non-recurring plan won't automatically have a next bill date set in Cheddar, so won't automatically be charged. In this scenario, your application would need to keep track of when the customers billing cycle ends. Since the customer won't have a next bill date, the automated bill reminder emails won't be sent, so you'll need to contact the customer to see if they'd like to keep their subscription. If the customer wants to keep their subscription, you can either manually run an invoice for the subscription in the user interface or make an API call to change the billingDatetime of their pending invoice to run it when you're ready. If the customer doesn't want to keep their subscription you'd need to cancel it (again, either manually in the UI or via the API).

    Hope that's helpful, but let me know if you have any follow-up questions, Richard!

    Meghan

  2. Marcela Poffald closed this discussion on 11 Apr, 2018 04:05 PM.

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