Bill your customers faster using subscription billing. Subscription payments are provided via Stripe, you will need to have an active Stripe account to use this feature.
Please note that the subscriptions feature is different from recurring invoices. The recurring invoices are used only to re-create the invoice on a specific date but with subscriptions, if the customer is subscribed to the subscription, he/she will be auto-billed via Stripe, and the invoice will be created automatically.
Configure Stripe subscriptions
You will need first to configure the Stripe Checkout payment gateway to use the Subscriptions feature.
Stripe Products
If you haven’t created your products and billing plans, you should create them via the Stripe Dashboard, Buiness GPS will fetch the billing plans directly from Stripe and will display them while creating/editing the subscription.
There is no option to add billing plans via Business GPS admin area, you should always add the billing plans via Stripe Dashboard.
Subscription Statuses
There are 8 subscription statuses in Business GPS, 5 are the default Stripe subscription statuses and one additional status is added Future.
You can read the lifecycle for subscriptions and statuses at by clicking here
Future – The additional Business GPS status "Future" means that the customer subscribed but the first billing date is in the future, for example, if the customer subscribes on 2018-05-18 and you configured the First Billing Date to be 2018-05-25, the subscription is active but the customer will be billed at the future date.
Business GPS subscriptions for Stripe do not support trial subscriptions
Create New Subscription
To create new subscriptions, from the main menu click Subscriptions then New Subscription.
Billing Plan
Select billing plans for this subscription, the billing plans will be automatically fetched from your Stripe account.
Quantity
Configure quantity if it’s necessary, otherwise leave it to 1
First Billing Date
This is the first billing date field, leave blank to use the date when the customer is subscribed to the subscription. This field must be a future date, if you select a date and the date is passed but the customer is not yet subscribed, the date when the customer will subscribe will be used.
Note that Stripe does not support the creation of subscriptions in past dates.
Subscription Name
Add the subscription name, shown to the customer too, in most cases, this will be your product name.
Description
You can add additional descriptions for this subscription, also visible to the customer.
Customer
Select the customer for this subscription.
Tax
You can select tax for the subscription.
The taxes are fetched directly from Stripe, if you haven’t configured your taxes in Stripe, you should do this via the Stripe dashboard by navigating to Billing->Tax Rates
Terms and Conditions
You can also add custom terms and conditions for the subscription, the terms and conditions will be shown at the bottom of the subscription preview area just before the customer subscribes to the subscription
Send a subscription to a customer
After you configure the subscription successfully, you may want to send the subscription to the customer, note that the subscriptions in Business GPS are related to the primary contact of the customer.
To send the subscription to the primary contact you can click on the top left email envelope button, additionally, if you want to view how the subscription will look, click on the View Subscription button.
You may want to take a look at Setup->Email Templates, to adjust the subscriptions email templates.
Show subscriptions in the customer area
If you want to show or hide subscriptions in the customer area, you can navigate to Setup->Settings->Subscriptions and set Show subscriptions in customer area to Yes.
Subscribe to subscription
In order customer to subscribe to a subscription, you must send the subscription to the customer's primary contact and include the subscription link in the email via the built-in email feature for subscription or send the subscription link manually.
After the customer accesses the subscription he/she can review the subscription and subscribe by clicking on the subscribe button.
Canceling Subscription
To get familiar with canceling the subscription, please read more about the official Stripe documentation by clicking here
Canceling from the admin area
If you want to cancel the subscription directly from the admin area, you can open the subscription and click on the cancel button, you will be able to see 2 options:
- Cancel
- Cancel at the end of the billing period
If you click Cancel, the subscription will be canceled immediately, if you click Cancel at the end of billing period, the subscription will be canceled based on the end billing period also, in this case, you can reactive the subscription, but if you cancel it immediately, there is no option to reactivate.
Cancelling from customers area.
The primary contact also can cancel the subscription via the customer area, the options are identical to those in the admin area.
Credit Card Token
Business GPS will store the Stripe customer ID in the database for future payments.
A credit card token is a token provided by Stripe related to the credit card that subscribed to the subscription, Business GPS does not store the credit card number in the database, the credit card token and last 4 digits are fetched directly from Stripe servers via API.
The primary contact can update the credit card anytime he/she wants by logging into the customer area and navigating from the top Profile menu -> Credit Card.
Sometimes your customers need to change the card info that they have on record with your business, whether that’s just to swap in a preferred card, or because the card issuer sent a replacement. Stripe takes care of updating expiring cards for you and also attempts to update saved card details when a customer’s physical card is replaced, but in rare cases, if Stripe is unable to update the card details automatically, the contact must update the credit card manually via the customer area by Clicking on their profile picture > credit card.
Reusing the credit card token
The credit card token for this customer will be used for future subscriptions too, as an example once the customer subscribes to the subscription, in Stripe, Business GPS will create a customer and this credit card token will be linked to this customer, also the customer id from Stripe will be stored in Business GPS database for future payments.
The next time you create a subscription for this customer, the customer won’t need to enter his credit card details again, he/she can just click a button and will be subscribed immediately.
Important Notes
- Do not edit the subscription directly from the Stripe dashboard, if you want to perform an edit you can do this via the Business GPS admin dashboard.
- Business GPS subscriptions only work with 1 line item (billing plan/product), do not add multiple subscription products via the Stripe dashboard to avoid unnecessary results.
- Once the customer is subscribed to a subscription, the subscription can’t be deleted, mark them as canceled instead (applicable for subscriptions created in LIVE mode).