This article covers
How to generate invoices before the renewal date?
Can I automate my “Bill Future Renewals”?
A customer wants to subscribe for 3 years, and pay now, what's the best way to do this?
Summary
Advancing an invoice lets you improve cash flow and bill your customers as and when they pay you avoiding the hassle of waiting for an invoice generation until the day the subscription is turned on. For example, if a customer makes payment on 15th April 2020 for a subscription that starts on 1st May 2020 you can invoice them in advance on 15th April 2020, once you realize the payment.
To invoice a subscription’s upcoming renewal beforehand, you can use the "Bill future renewals" option from Subscriptions.
Note: This feature is available only from the Scale plan and above however it is available on your test site by default. If you would like to enable this for your account contact support.
Steps to configure an advance invoice via the web interface:
Create a subscription with a future activation date say, 16th Nov 2020
Go to the Subscriptions details page
Under the Action panel click Bill Future Renewals
Enter the number of subscription renewals that you would like to bill immediately (the Max allowed number of renewals is 24)
Click Preview Changes and review the invoice amount
Click Generate to apply changes to the invoice.
Note: The above workflow is possible only when the customer has "Auto Collection" turned “ON” and has a valid form of payment credentials linked to the subscription.
Bill Future Renewals also works when “Auto collection” is turned “OFF” when the customer makes an offline payment via cash, cheque, or bank transfer provided, the offline payments are recorded after invoice generation manually.
Use the “Charge Future Renewals” API to automate the advance billing.
Note: Total Upcoming payment for a specific customer
We have updated our summary box to provide a more streamlined and elegant user experience. With this upgrade, hyperlinks have been added to the summary box, allowing users to easily access related information. The Total Upcoming Payment on Summary Section is available at the top of the Customer details page which provides a total amount due of a customer and hyperlink that directs to the details. Refer to this link for more details.
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