Subscriptions

A subscription enables you to charge a customer for a plan of their choice. Below are the list of actions you can perform on subscriptions.


New Subscription

You can create a new subscription for a customer either directly from the customer’s Overview page or from the Subscriptions module.

Here’s how you create a new subscription from a customer’s Overview page:

To create a new subscription from the Subscriptions module:


Edit Subscription

You can edit your customers’ subscriptions to make necessary changes to their subscriptions. You can use the edit option to upgrade or downgrade your customers’ existing or canceled subscriptions.

To edit a subscription:

Once you’ve selected when to apply the changes,

The subscription will now be updated.


Future Subscriptions

In a business scenario, you might sometimes want to create subscriptions in a future date and Zoho Billing exactly allows you to do that without any struggle.

Future subscriptions can be created like any other subscriptions in Zoho Billing. All you have to do is select the date (future date) in the Starts On field on which the subscription has to be activated. For subscriptions with a trial period, the subscription trial will start on the selected date.


Subscription Term

Starts on - You can choose to charge a customer from the current date as well as any future date.

Expires After - If you want the subscription to expire only when it gets cancelled by either yourself or the customer, check Never Expires. If you want the subscription to expire after a certain duration, make sure Never Expires is unchecked and enter the number of cycles after which the subscription should expire.

Reference number - A reference number can be used to identify a subscription as long as the reference number is unique for each subscription.

Sales Person - You can associate your subscription with a sales person.

The price of plans, addons and the number of cycles after which a subscription should expire can be exclusive for a subscription. In other words, these values can be changed while creating or editing a subscription and this will not affect the original values set during creation of plan or addon.


Tax Exclusive or Tax Inclusive Subscriptions

You can select the tax applied on subscriptions as Tax Inclusive or Tax Exclusive from the subscription’s creation page. By default, the subscription’s tax will be selected as Tax Exclusive. This option will be available only if you’ve chosen the tax preference for items and products as Tax Inclusive or Tax Exclusive under Settings > Preferences > General.

Tax Inclusive or Tax Exclusive

Note: This option is available only for organizations which were created after December 2023. To enable this feature for your organization, reach out to our support team at support@zohobilling.com.


Payment mode

There are two kinds of payment modes - offline and online.

Online - If payment is to be made through the customer’s card, make sure that Collect payment offline is unchecked.

Offline - If payment is to be made by customers through cheques, cash or other means wherein you do not store their card information, check Collect payment offline.

Note: At any point, you can change the subscription from Online mode to Offline mode and vice versa.

Navigate to the subscription and click on Change to Offline Mode under Payment Information.

For subscriptions to be changed from offline to online, you must first associate a card with the subscription by clicking on Associate Payment Options > Associate Card. Enter the card details and click on Save and Change to Online.


Adding a one-time addon

A separate invoice will be raised for a one-time addon. Here’s how you can add a one-time addon to a subscription.


Adding a charge

You can associate one-time charges to your customers’ subscriptions. These charges will be raised in a separate invoice:


Applying a coupon

A coupon can be applied for a subscription at any time.

But at any point of time, there can be only one coupon applied to a subscription.

To apply a coupon for a subscription, please follow the below steps.


Discounts

Note: This feature is currently in early access. Reach out to our support team at support@zohobilling.com to enable this for your organization.

Discounts are an essential tool used in businesses to attract new customers and improve sales. Salespersons often offer customized discounts to new customers, which adds a personal touch to their sale. Zoho Billing allows you to offer flat and percentage discounts to your customers both at the item-level and transaction-level according to your business needs.

Insight:Discounts are different from coupons. Coupons are often used for promotions and to provide standard discounts to customers, while you can use discounts to give competitive and personalized pricing to different customers.

To give discounts to your customers while creating a subscription:

Note: If a discount is applied to a subscription, coupons cannot be applied to the subscription. If you want to apply a coupon to the subscription, you have to update the subscription and remove the discount.

Insight: You can also create custom API Hosted Payment Pages with associated discounts and share the personalised link with your customers for them to sign up.


Changing subscription details

You can change subscription details like billing information, contact person, reference numbers, card details, payment mode and notes.

Change next billing date The next renewal date can be postponed. Click Change and select any future date. If the next billing date is changed from Jan 1st to Jan 10th, the subsequent billing date would be on Feb 10th.

Reference number You can add/update a reference number for the subscription at any time.

Manage customers When you click Manage Contacts, you can view the list of email IDs of customers and contact persons. Check the email IDs to which subscription related notifications need to be sent.

Notes Add a short note about the subscription.


Extending a subscription

When a subscription is about to expire, you can extend the billing cycle(s) instead of creating a new subscription for the customer.

To extend a subscription for your customer, just change the number of billing cycle and the subscription will be updated. This can be done easily from the subscription’s overview page.

Note: You will not be able to extend the following types of subscriptions:

For Offline Subscriptions

If you have already received the payment for extending a subscription, you can record the payment here.

This option is only applicable for offline subscriptions. Also, the payment will be recorded as Excess payments under that customer.

If you want to apply the excess amount to the invoices automatically upon its renewal, enable the Apply excess payments to offline Subscriptions under Invoice preferences. After enabling, these excess payments will be applied automatically to invoices that are raised during the next renewal.


Generate Draft Invoices in Subscriptions

By default, when you create a subscription for a customer in Zoho Billing, an invoice will be created and sent to the customer when the subscription is Live, or when the subscription is renewed. However, there might be cases when you would like to review the invoices or make changes to the invoices according to your needs before sending them to your customers. Zoho Billing allows you to generate invoices in the Draft status when a subscription is created, updated, or renewed. You can review or edit them and then send them to your customers.

Note: You can enable this feature only for subscriptions that are autocharge-disabled.

Enable Draft Invoices for All Subscriptions

Note: This is an early access feature. If you want to enable this in your organization, write to our support team at support@zohobilling.com. Once enabled, the default preference for autocharge-disabled subscription invoices will be Generate invoices as drafts.

You can set all autocharge-disabled subscriptions to generate draft invoices in your organization. Here’s how:

Now, draft invoices will be generated for all autocharge-disabled subscriptions when they are live, updated, or renewed.

Note: Once you enable this feature for your organization, draft invoices will be generated for your existing autocharge-disabled subscriptions as well. If you want to generate invoices in the Draft status for specific subscriptions, you can enable or disable them individually or bulk-update them.

Generate Draft Invoices for Individual Subscriptions

If you want to generate draft invoices for specific subscriptions, you can choose the preference while creating or editing autocharge-disabled subscriptions. To create a subscription with draft invoices:

Now, a draft invoice will be generated when the subscription is moved to the Live status, which can be edited and sent to the customer.

To generate draft invoices in existing subscriptions:

Now, draft invoices will be generated for the subscription at the beginning of the next billing cycle, which can be edited and sent to the customer.

Note: When you enable or disable generating draft invoices for individual subscriptions, the organization-wide preferences will be ignored for the subscriptions.

Bulk Update Invoice Preferences for Subscriptions

If you want to enable or disable generating draft invoices for multiple autocharge-disabled subscriptions, you can bulk update them. Here’s how:

Disable Draft Invoices for All Subscriptions

If you want to disable generating draft invoices for all autocharge-disabled subscriptions in your organization, follow the steps mentioned below:

Now, invoices will be created and sent to your customers for payment whenever an autocharge-disabled subscription is Live, updated, or renewed.


Pause and Resume Subscriptions

If your customer wants to suspend their subscription temporarily, but doesn’t necessarily want to cancel it, pausing and resuming subscriptions is the way to go. This way, your customer will not be charged for their subscription while it is paused, and can pay for their subscription when they’re ready to resume it.

When should you pause subscriptions instead of canceling them?

Pausing subscriptions is recommended over temporarily canceling and re-activating them, because pausing subscriptions won’t affect your churn reports. However, it should not be seen as an alternative to actually canceling subscriptions when your customers ask you to do so.

Scenario: Larissa gets a box of groceries delivered to her every week on a subscription basis. With the holiday season approaching, she decides to go out of town on a vacation for three weeks. However, she doesn’t want to pay for her grocery subscription during this time and notifies her grocer about this. Her grocer, who uses Zoho Billing, simply sets a pause and resume schedule for Larissa’s subscription. Now, Larissa’s weekly grocery box will not be delivered to her when she’s out of town and will automatically resume when she’s back.


In this section:

Pause Subscriptions

Prerequisite:

To pause subscriptions, you will have to enable the feature in your organization:

  • Go to Settings > Subscriptions > General

  • Enable the Pause and Resume option. 

  • Click Save.

Now, the feature has been enabled and you’re ready to pause subscriptions.

When a subscription is in the Paused status, it will not be renewed on its billing date and invoices will not be raised for it.

Points to note about pausing subscriptions:

Pro Tip: You can view the end-of-term changes by going to a subscription’s details page and clicking View Changes.

To pause a subscription:

Warning: The resume date while pausing a subscription is optional. However, by leaving it empty, the subscription will be paused indefinitely, until you resume it manually.

Now, the subscription will be paused according to the schedule that you’ve configured. 

Warning: Subscriptions can only be paused if they are in the Live status. If a subscription’s status changes on the day that it’s scheduled to pause, the subscription will not be paused. For example, if a subscription’s status changes from Live to Non-renewing or Dunning, on its scheduled pause date, the subscription will not be paused.

Resume Subscriptions

Points to note about resuming subscriptions:

If you had set a resume date while pausing your subscription, your subscription will resume automatically on this date. However, if you did not do this, and your subscription is paused indefinitely, you will be able to resume the subscription manually. Here’s how: 

Pro Tip: Select the Paused Subscriptions view filter from the view filter dropdown to easily identify your paused subscriptions.

Your subscription will resume according to the schedule that you’ve configured. 

Change Pause and Resume Schedules

You can change the pause and resume schedules for your subscription at any time.

Here, you will be able to change your pause and resume schedules. You can also delete the schedule entirely by clicking Delete Schedule.

Insight: By deleting the schedule, only the configured pause and resume dates will be deleted, and your subscription’s status will remain unchanged. For example, if your subscription is paused and you delete the schedule for your resume date, the subscription will remain paused.

Events for Paused and Resumed Subscriptions

You can use automation workflows, such as webhooks, to let your business systems know that a subscription has been paused or resumed in Zoho Billing.

You can create webhooks that are triggered when a subscription has been paused or resumed, using the Subscription Paused and Subscription Resumed events, respectively. 

These events can also be used to trigger email alerts, which can be useful to notify your customers when a subscription has been paused or resumed. 


Cancelling a subscription

Churn is inevitable but knowing and tracking the reasons for the downgrades is a crucial measure. We have provided you with an additional key to track your churn. Now you can configure various possible reasons that your customer might have, to cancel your subscription. They can give you their valuable feedback when cancelling through the portal.

Where this helps ?

The churned subscriptions reports, non renewing profiles and much more lets you visualise the cancelled subscriptions and their details. Searching subscriptions with their date and filtering through for cancellations due to a particular reason, might give you insights on your business.

A subscription can be canceled either by you or by your customer.

By you:

By your customers:

A subscription can only be cancelled from Customer Portal, if the cancel subscription option is enabled for them in the portal settings.

To enable the cancel subscription option for your customers,

For your customers to cancel a subscription from Customer Portal,

Pro-Tip:-

Cancel immediately - This will cancel the subscription right away.

Cancel on next renewal - This will cancel the subscription at the end of the current term (i.e) the next billing date.


Reactivating a subscription

If the subscription was cancelled using Cancel on next renewal, here’s how you can reactivate the subscription before the term ends.

If the subscription was cancelled using the Cancel immediately option, follow the below steps to reactivate the subscription.


Reactivating an expired subscription

Reactivating an expired subscription allows you to create the same subscription for the same customer without having the need to add the plans, coupons and add-ons again. You can also choose to edit the plans, coupons and add-ons if you wish to.

To reactivate the expired subscription, follow the steps below:


Deleting a subscription

A subscription in any state can be deleted at any point of time. To delete a subscription,


Custom View

Custom View can be used to display subscription information that you feel relevant by creating a set of rules. Let’s take a scenario for us to understand better.

Scenario 1:

When the default Active filter is used it displays information such as Date, Customer Name, Email, Status etc. Sometimes, you might not need the excess information for subscriptions that are in Active State. So, what you can do is, create a Custom View and display only the relevant information that you need. For instance, you can remove the Activated On information column or any other column that you feel irrelevant.

Similarly, you can create a custom view to list the subscriptions that involves one particular Sales Person. Or, list the subscriptions that were cancelled on a particular date.

So, now that you’ve understood how Custom View works, let’s learn how to,

Create a Custom View

To create a custom view,

Edit a Custom View

To edit a custom view,

Delete a Custom View

To delete a Custom View,

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