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Delay the 1st billing date

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Romain

03 Jan, 2017 01:01 PM

For some customer I need to delay the date when they will be charged for the first time (e.g. you subscribed on Jan 15th 2017 and your plan will start on Feb 1st 2017)

I don't want to do this by creating n plans with free trial periods, I want to do it at the level of the customer.

Is the Bill date field in the Edit subscription section the way to do this?

Thx,

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Meghan Turner on 03 Jan, 2017 03:33 PM

   

   Hi Romain,

   Yes, you can change the customer's next bill date manually via the user interface by changing the Bill Date in the edit subscription section of the customer record in CG. If you'd like to automate this process, you could also use webhooks to change the customer's next bill date when your hook listener receives the new subscription hook.

   Out of curiosity, could you tell me why you don't want to use a pricing plan with a free trial for these customers? I'm always interested in learning more about the ways our customers are using CG, so any details you can provide about your use case would be helpful! Thanks, Romain.

   Meghan

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2. 2 Posted by Romain on 03 Jan, 2017 03:55 PM

   

   Hi Meghan,

   One question :

   I am a customer with a $10 subscription

   I subscribed on Jan 15th I am supposed to be billed on Feb 15th.

   We change the billing date to March 1st

   How much will I be changed? $10? $15?

   In that particular case, we would like to bill $10.

   I don't mind using a free trial as long as I can manually set the duration of the free trial without manually setting up a new plan in cheddar getter.

   thx

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3. Support Staff 3 Posted by Meghan Turner on 03 Jan, 2017 06:52 PM

   

   Hi Romain,

   As long as you change the bill date before February 15th, the customer will be charged $10.00 on March 1st. CG won't add an additional amount to an invoice if the bill date is changed unless you edit the invoice to add charges.

   In CG, free trials on sign-up are typically set-up through the pricing plan by setting the customers first bill date to be a certain number of days after they sign-up (the number of days can be anything you like, but will be the same number of days for every customer subscribed to that plan). You could also set-up a pricing plan that is configured to have no initial bill date and then, using the API, set the initialBilldate parameter to be whatever date you'd like when the customer signs-up. I think you may be using the hosted pages and, if so, using the API to update the customer record won't be an option for you right now, but switching to the API may be something to consider for the future if you'd like to automate the process of changing billing date times instead of using a hook listener or changing the date manually.

   If what you need is to be able to have a free trial for a number of days that varies by customer rather than by plan type, I think your initial suggestion of changing the bill date manually in the user interface or using a hook listener to set the customer's first bill date is probably the best way to go for the time being.

   Meghan

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4. Marcela Poffald closed this discussion on 11 Apr, 2018 04:03 PM.