Renewals Overview

What are renewals and what options do they allow?

For a majority of billing settings, you have the option to automatically renew your products. With this option turned on, contacts who purchase this product will be renewed onto subsequent billing periods, without any intervention required.  The contact can be billed automatically, meaning they can purchase once, and let the automation take care of the rest.

Your renewals will appear in the renewals report (where they can be suspended if desired) until a set number of days before the renewal is due (the default is fourteen), whereupon they will become orders. If you wish to adjust a renewal's price, or payable date you can adjust the order at this point. Otherwise, there is no need to intervene and you can leave the renewals to run as they are.

Set Up

To activate automatic renewals, simply turn the option on in Settings > Products:

• Navigate to Settings > Products
• Select the relevant product group or product
• Under "Billing and renewal" scroll to Renewals and select "Automatically renew customers"
• Select "Save" below

This is all you need to do to activate automatic renewals. When the current billing period (Monthly, Annually) is up, contacts will be automatically billed for the next as per the billing date.

Renewing Terms & Schedules
If you are running automatic renewals for a scheduled class or event, your contacts will automatically be reserved, then charged for the next schedule in line with the billing period. 

If you are billing weekly or monthly, the auto-renewal will keep your contacts on the schedule for as long as the schedule runs.

If your schedule comes to an end, the system will look for the next schedule for that product and book contacts onto the next schedule at the same time as they currently attend. If there is no schedule after the current one, or the time is no longer available contacts will not be renewed.

• An annual membership that is billed on the first of September, will renew the next time it is the first of September.
• A monthly class with a rolling schedule will renew each month onto the next month's classes
• A termly class with the billing set to "immediately" will look for a schedule for the same product and available times that starts after the current schedule finishes, and renew contacts onto that new schedule.

In each instance, the contact will be invoiced automatically and payment will be taken based off of the billing settings.

Other Available Options

When setting your renewal up in Products, you have a few more options available:

Age Restrictions and Renewals

If you have age restrictions set up, you can choose to only renew the contacts who fit the age restrictions. This is commonly used to set up a chain that will move contacts through different products as they age, without the need for intervention. To set up a simple chain, follow the instructions below:

• Turn on auto-renewals as above
• Select "On renewal, only invite customers whose age will fall within the age restrictions criteria
  • This will mean that only customers who satisfy the age restrictions will be renewed
• If you wish for the customers who are now too old to be invited to a different product, you can select a product from the drop-down below
  • For example, for the Under 7s product, choose for them to be invited into the Under 8s for the new season

A very common example for this, is to set up for your season so that contacts get moved through various age groups. If your age group products have the age restrictions set accordingly, the system will only allow people in at the right age. When they are too old, they will be invited to the age group above for that season, until they are too old once more and the cycle repeats. 

With a set up like this, you can effectively remove all manual steps from renewals into a new season.

Remaining Options

• Days before renewal to generate orders - Allows you to choose how long before the renewal that orders are generated for editing prices or payable dates
• Send pre-renewal message - let's you choose an email template and to send a message before a contact is renewed
• Send on-renewal message - let's you choose an email template and to send a message after a contact is renewed