Managing Customers 

In Chargebee we use customers to hold all the details of a subscriber. The customer acts as the main object to store and manage the subscribers' billing & contact information, card details, and payment mode.

Creating a New Customer 

Customers can be created in three ways:

  • When a new subscription is created
  • Through the web interface
  • Using the API

When a New Subscription is Created

When a new subscription is created either through the hosted page, Chargebee user interface or through the API, Chargebee automatically creates a new customer as well.

Through Chargebee Site

You can create a new customer under Customers > Create Customer.

Using API

You can use the Create a customer  API to create a new customer.

Once a customer is created, it contains basic attributes including customer id, name, email, company name and phone number. These attributes are common to the customer object.

The additional entities linked to the customer object are:

Except subscriptions, all the other entities are common to the customer object.

Accessing Customer Information in Chargebee 

You can access your customer details from the Customers tab.

Clicking on the Name of a customer will open the Customer details page which contains all the information pertaining to the customer such as subscription, billing info, payment methods etc.

You can also perform other operations such as Send Email, Export, etc. from within the index page shown above.

  • Send Email: You can send emails to all your customers in a single shot by clicking on more icon next to the search bar, and clicking Email Customers. You can also make use of the common templates and mail merge tags available below the email body to personalize the emails.
  • Export: Exports all the customers in your current site as a ZIP file by clicking on more icon next to the search bar, and clicking Export Customers CSV.
  • Bulk Action: You can perform bulk actions such as Delete or Change auto collection settings for one or more customer records using this option. Select one or more records and click the respective buttons to perform these actions. Bulk Actions can only be performed by admins.
  • Search: You can search for a customer using the search bar on the left.
  • Customize Columns: Customize columns to show details that you want to see.
  • Sort: Sort the customer based on the selected choice.

The Net Payment column on the customer's index page gets populated only for Active subscriptions having currency the same as the base currency of your site.

Exempting a Customer from Tax Payment 

You can choose to exempt a customer from paying taxes by selecting the This customer is tax exempt checkbox.

When metered billing is enabled in your Chargebee site, and you have configured to auto-close pending invoices and allowed overriding via Chargebee interface, you can select Do not auto-close invoices.

You can add/review usage, manually close the invoices and send them to customers.

Similarly, when Consolidated Invoicing is enabled in your Chargebee site, you can override the global setting for this customer record using the drop-down.

Paying via bank account 

When you need a customer to pay directly from their bank account, or other offline payment methods, you can select your preferred Offline Method while creating the customer record. This is possible for new and existing customers.

The drop-down would show up only if you have configured offline payment methods.

For new customers:

In your Chargebee user interface, click Customers > Create Customer. The Payment Method drop-down shows up in the create customer page as shown below:

For existing customers:

In your Chargebee user interface, go to the customer for whom you need bank payment enabled and click Edit Customer found on the Action pane. Then, select the required option.

Subscriptions 

You can either create a subscription for an existing customer or a new customer. When a new subscription is created, a customer object is automatically created as well.

Creating subscriptions for an existing customer can be done through the web interface or using the API .

To create a new subscription for a customer through Chargebee user interface, navigate to the customer's profile and click Create New Subscription option as shown here:

Click here to read more about subscriptions.

See also

Use Quotes in Chargebee to send a pricing quote to your customers before signing them up.

Custom Fields 

Apart from the default fields provided for the customer object, you can create custom fields to track additional customer information.

See also

Customer Payment Method Details 

Chargebee supports a host of different payment methods and multiple payment methods per customer. Once a customer's payment method details are added, the payment method is tried every time a charge needs to be collected.

If you are adding multiple payment methods against a customer, Chargebee also allows you to mark one as primary and another as backup to ensure you don't lose revenue in case a payment method fails.

Payment method details can be added, updated or removed for a customer using the web interface, Chargebee's API, and Chargebee's hosted pages. Check out payment methods overview for more information.

Excess Payments 

If you have collected payment from a customer in advance, or if the customer has made a single payment for multiple invoices, use the Record an offline payment option to account for the same:

The recorded payment will be automatically applied to the future invoices. It can also be manually applied to the existing Not Paid or Payment Due invoices.

Auto Collection Status 

The Auto collection status of a customer decides whether or not subscriptions linked to the customer should be charged automatically using the card on file. If Auto collection is Off, the subscriptions will not be charged automatically even if the card is present. When Auto collection is On, an attempt to charge the card will be made.

Note
  • When a subscription moves from TRIAL to ACTIVE state with auto collection ON and no card on file, it will be cancelled. However, if the subscription's value is $0, it will not be cancelled even though the Auto collection is "On" and no card on file because there is no attempt to collect charges.

  • If you've enabled the Payment Terms option for your invoices, and you've turned Auto collection "Off" for a customer, the invoice will be marked as Posted. An email notification will be sent to them, and once the customer is close to the due date, the invoice status will change to Payment Due.

Customer Billing Address 

A customer's billing address can be captured during sign up for customers with and without a card. If you've enabled billing address validation, then the billing address information needs to be provided by the customer during sign up.

For merchants in the EU region who've enabled EU VAT, the taxes will be applied based on the billing country specified during sign up. So when creating subscriptions, you need to explicitly provide the billing country for the system to decide whether tax needs to be applied or not.

For subscriptions created without passing the billing country, EU VAT will not be applied.

Billing address for customers with card

The customer's billing information is linked to the customer's credit card for online subscriptions.

When a subscription is created with a card on file, the billing address captured along with the card details will be used as the customer's billing address as well. But you can edit the customer's billing info if needed, using the Update Billing Info option available in the Actions panel.

Note

When only updating the billing information for a customer, the credit card billing info will not be updated. Similarly, when you update the card's billing info while updating the card details, the customer's billing info is not automatically updated.

In a nutshell, for customers with a card, there is no need to worry about updating the customer's billing address separately.

Billing address for offline customers

Offline customers are subscribers who do not have a card on file and have an offline subscription.

For offline subscriptions, the billing information can also be collected during sign up. If you've selected the billing address fields for validation, these fields will be automatically displayed when creating the offline subscription through the Chargebee user interface.

When creating offline subscriptions using the API, you can include the additional attributes for billing_address using the customer  object.

For offline subscriptions, you can update the billing information within the subscription through the web interface or through the update billing info for customer API.

Add Contact 

If your customer wants their team or an alternative point of contact to receive emails related to billing such as invoices, payment success notifications, etc., you can configure Chargebee to send them emails using the Add additional contacts option. For example, if your customer would like their accounts team to receive a copy of the invoice, you could add the accountant's email or the team's email as an additional contact and link it to the respective customer. You can add up to a maximum of ten contacts.

Note

You can also have the email addresses added here be validated for duplicates. Contact support  to enable this. Once enabled, this feature will prevent Chargebee users from adding an email address that is already present either as a Contact or as the primary email address of the customer. However, also note that duplicate email addresses are still allowed across individual customer records in Chargebee.

To link an additional contact, go to customer's details page and click Add additional contacts:

The form for adding contacts appears, as shown below:

Fill in the Id - this will be the reference ID used by Chargebee API  to identify the contact.

Fill in the name, email address, and phone number. Use the Tag field to add a tag for your reference.

Emails 

The emails that can be sent to this additional contact are categorized into two groups:

Billing Emails 

Enable this option if you want your team to receive the following emails:

  • Invoice Receipt
  • Payment Succeeded
  • Payment Failed
  • Payment Refunded
  • Payment Initiated
  • Refund Initiated
  • Card Expiring
  • Card Expired

Account Emails 

Enable this option if you want your team to receive the following emails:

  • Subscription Created
  • Subscription Started
  • Subscription Trial Ending
  • Subscription Renewal
  • Subscription Activation
  • Subscription Changed
  • Subscription Cancellation
  • Shipping Address Updated

Click Add to save.

The contacts added using this option will appear under a new section, Additional Contacts, as shown below:

This section also provides the options to add, edit, remove contacts, or disable email notifications for them.

Note

This option is available for users assigned the role of Customer Support (Settings > Team Members), or a role with more access than that of Customer Support.

Deleting a Customer 

If you wish to delete a customer record in Chargebee, open the specific customer's details page and click the Delete Customer option available on the Actions panel.

This operation is irreversible - all data related to the customer, such as Subscriptions and Invoices, will be deleted.

The numbers in the following reports will get modified when a Customer is deleted:

  • Payments
  • New Revenue
  • Signups
  • Activations
  • Cancellations
  • Refunds
Note
  • The option to delete a Customer is available only for the role Admin.
  • Card information of the customer will be removed from the gateway via a delete request.

You can also delete a Customer using the Delete a Customer API .

Note:
The Delete Customer action or API call is unavailable for the customer records linked to gift subscriptions (i.e. those of gifters and the recipients).

Clear Personal Data 

For eligible customer records, a special action called Clear Personal Data is available on the action pane (provided Personal Data Management is configured). Based on certain site configurations, this action clears the personally identifiable information in the customer record to help protect customer data privacy.

Clear Personal Data is different from Delete Customer. The fine points of difference are noted in a question in this FAQ.

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