Chargebee allows you to pause the subscription from renewing temporarily and place them on hold with the Pause Subscription feature.
You can pause a customer's subscription on his request.
Say, your customer is traveling and will not be using the subscription till he returns, or they won't be home when you deliver the package they subscribed, or you're unable to deliver the product temporarily, or when there are issues with the payment, you can place the subscription on hold.
Subscriptions held on pause will not show up in reports as a churn. You can filter the subscriptions that are paused.
When a subscription is paused:
Options for Pause:
If the resume date is not mentioned, subscription will continue to stay on pause indefinitely.
Chargebee gives you options to configure other business essentials concerning the subscriptions on pause:
Here's how you can configure business essentials in your Chargebee site when a subscription is being paused:
Unbilled charges in a paused subscription can be dealt with in two ways
When the subscription is paused, and there are invoices associated to the subscription that are in dunning, you can choose whether the invoices should continue with dunning or stop dunning.
If you choose to continue dunning for the subscription that is paused, the final action will take over even if the subscription is on pause.
Say, the customer has enabled Consolidated invoicing and chooses to stop dunning for the paused subscription. Chargebee will check if there is at least one active subscription listed in the invoice, and will not stop dunning for the said invoice. However the subscription will be paused.
A subscription in pause can be resumed at any point in time.
It can either be done manually or can be scheduled to be resumed on a future date.
If no resume date is mentioned, the subscription will be paused indefinitely
For a scheduled resumption, the resumption date can be updated even when the subscription is on pause.
When the subscription resumes, you can choose to collect payment for the existing unpaid invoices of the subscription or retain them as unpaid. The attempt will be made to collect the payment only when Auto-Collection is ON for the subscription. Chargebee will collect payment for the paused subscription if the paused subscription resumes within the billing term.
There are 2 scenarios that come in to play when a subscription resumes, as far as the billing term of the subscription is concerned:
This is when a subscription is paused and resumed within the billing term of the subscription.
Say, the subscription renews on the 1st of every month. If the subscription is paused on 15th and resumed on the 25th, this is considered an in-term resumption.
For in-term resumption, Chargebee will try and collect the payment for the unpaid invoice of the current term right when the subscription resumes, given dunning is not in progress for the invoice. If the payment does not go through, Chargebee will hold the subscription on pause.
When a subscription resumes in-term, no new charges will be invoiced.
When a paused subscription resumes after the renewal date, it is considered as an out of term resumption.
Say, the subscription renews on the 1st of every month. If the subscription is paused on the 15th and resumed on the 10th of the next month, this is considered an out of term resumption.
In this case, a new invoice will be generated on the 10th of March. If the payment goes through, the subscription will resume, else it will remain paused.
The collection of the invoice generated on the 1st of Feb will be scheduled as soon as the subscription resumes.
If calendar billing is enabled, subscription term will align with the billing date and charges will be raised accordingly.
If you do not have calendar billing enabled for your Chargebee site, resuming the subscription out of term will update the renewal date of the subscription to the date of resumption. Say, a subscription with the start date as 1st of every month was paused and resumed on the 10th of the next month. The subscription renewal date will now be updated to 10th.
Pausing a subscription will have the following impacts:
What will happen to the non-recurring charges if the subscription is resumed before the end of the billing term?
If the subscription resumes before the end of the billing term, non-recurring charges will not be invoiced right away. Said charges will be added to the invoice of the subscription renewal.
