This article will cover the billing options and what they do in your product billing settings
Note: This article is part of the overall Product Settings article.
Billing settings control when and how your contacts are charged. This article will go through each of the available options and what they do:
General
- Billing - Choose your billing frequency
- Single payment - bills a one time payment that cannot be renewed
- Weekly/Monthly/Annually - Bills for that time frame, with the option to renew
- Approve purchase before payment - Choose if an administrator is required to approve the purchase before the contact is invoiced
- If this option is active, contacts will not be billed on registration through your shop, but they will still need to supply payment details
- Collect payments automatically? - Choose if payments will be taken automatically when a customer is invoiced or user must authorise payment
Tip: It's useful to understand how pre-purchase approval and automatic payments work together:
| Pre-Purchase Approval | No approval required | |
| Automatic payments |
Contact is not billed on registration Payment is collected automatically when approved and for future invoices and renewals |
Contact is billed on registration Payments will be collected automatically for future invoices and renewals |
| User must authorise payments |
Contact is not billed on registration After approval, contact must log in to authorise the payment, and for future invoices and renewals |
Contact is billed on registration Contact must log in to authorise payments for future invoices and renewals |
- Choose the pro-rata method - Choose if you wish to automatically pro-rata the price for purchases made part-way through a schedule or season
Instalments
Here we can manage our instalment options. Instalments run monthly and customers can choose how many instalments they'd like to pay up to a maximum allowance.
- Allow monthly instalments - Toggle whether instalments are active for this product
- Maximum instalments - Set the maximum allowable instalments
- This will generate the number of remaining instalments and the final available instalment date
- Per Instalment Premium - Set an additional charge to be taken for each instalment
Billing
Weekly/Monthly/Annually Only
Here we set when contacts are billed and when billing period start:
-
Anniversary of original purchase (i.e. a rolling period) - billing period is flexible and renews the same day/date as the purchase was made
- Weekly - Renews the same day each week as per the original purchase
- Monthly - Renews the same date each month as per the original purchase
- Annually - Renews the same date and month as per the original purchase
- Billing period starts on - Let's you choose a fixed date that everyone will be billed
- A specific month of the year - Let's you choose a fixed month that everyone will be billed (annually only)
- Would you like funds to clear in your account by this day? - tick this for invoices to be requested in advance of the selected date, so that they will have cleared into your account by the date chosen above. See the GoCardless or London & Zurich articles for more information
Warning: There is no guarantee that money will be collected on the exact billing date due to bank non-working days at weekends and bank holidays and will then be settled into your account normally 1-2 days after (additional delay if a bank holiday weekend)
- Force the purchase of the next period (Subscription/Membership products only) - Set how many days before the start of a new billing period that contacts will stop signing up for the current season and instead pre-order the next. For more information see the full article here.
Payment Providers
Here you choose which payment providers you want available for that product. You can pick and choose different combinations and have different settings for each product.
- Receive the first payment by - Which payment providers are available for the first payment of a product
- Receive subsequent payments by - Which payment providers are available for renewed payments or for instalments
Caution: You must have a payment provider selected before any purchases and sign-ups for a product can be made.
Renewals
Only available for Weekly/Monthly/Annually billing
Here you can choose your renewal options for products
- Automatically renew customers - Tick to allow this product to automatically renew based off the billing settings above
- On renewal, only invite customers whose age will fall within the age restrictions criteria - If you want renewals to obey your age restrictions, choose this option
- If customers are not automatically renewed to this product, you can select another product they should renew for (if relevant) - If you select the option above, here you can choose what product a contact would be invited to instead
- This is commonly used for children progressing through age groups in team sports
- Days before renewal to generate orders - This is how many days before a renewal is sent out that a scheduled order is generated
- Send pre-renewal message - Set up a notification to be sent ahead of renewal, the standard template for this to select is "product renewal invitation"
- Send on-renewal message - Set up a notification to be sent on renewal, the standard template for this to select is "on raise invoice"