Subscription Summary

Each time a customer purchases a product you have, a new Subscription entry will be created. The Subscription Summary is where you’ll perform all tasks necessary to manage your customer’s purchase through Chargify. It contains an ever changing snapshot of your Subscriber’s current financial data.

One Customer can own many Subscriptions. If a customer owns two Subscriptions, they will have two Subscription summaries. Subscription summaries can only contain a single Subscription.

The Subscription Summary page contains information about each Subscription. The summary is broken down into 12 categories and are detailed below.

Activated At

Activated At displays the date the Subscription was first activated. In the event that you created a subscription that bills in the future (had not billed yet), this date will reflect the day the subscription entry was created in Chargify.

Activity

Activity is a window into the recent changes to a Subscription. It is a replica of what is displayed in Site Activity. Please review the Site Activity documentation for a summary of each entry.

Hover over a date to view the exact timestamp for any activity.

Add New Credit Card

If you have full credit card information for a Subscriber enter a new card by selecting Add New Credit Card. Billing address information is option

If you have ACH enabled and are an Authorize.Net user on US soil, you’ll be able to edit/add ACH information here. Please see our documentation on ACH here.

Billing Portal Access

When viewing a subscription, you can see the currecnt status of their access to the Billing Portal.

Disabled

Enabled

View the customer’s Billing Portal directly, or access the link to send to your customer via email. Viewing the management link is also a very useful way to view how your customers are presented the information in the Billing Portal.

View pop-up of Billing Portal Management link

Pop-up view of Billing Portal Management link

Billing Portal Resend Invitation

If your Subscriber is unsure of how to locate the Billing Portal, use this option to resend the invitiation to your Subscriber.

Billing Portal Revoke Portal Access

On a per Subscription basis, you may need to revoke access to the portal. Select “Revoke Portal Access”. Once you revoke access, Billing Portal Status will display “Portal Not Enabled” for this Subscriber.

Select “Enable Portal Access” to reverse re-enable the portal for your Subscriber. Once you select this option, you’ll be presented with the following pop-up:

You can choose to simply enable Billing Portal for this customer, or enable Billing Portal and send them an emailed invitation.

Billing Portal Status

If the Billing Portal is enabled, a Subscription will include information regarding:

  • Added To Portal: The date that the customer was first given access to the portal.
  • Last Invite Sent: The last date in which the customer was invited to the portal.

These two dates can be drastically different in the event that manual invitations are sometimes used. For more information on manual Billing Portal invites, please see our documenation here.

Customer Details

The customer details specifies a few crucial pieces of information about the purchaser of your product or service.

  • ID: The customer ID of your Subscriber. not editable
  • Email address The address on file of the customer
  • CC emails Any cc email address on file. All emails will be CC’d to the following addresses. Separate multiple emails with a comma.
  • Phone The phone number on file of the customer.
  • Organization The organization/company on file for the customer.
  • Reference ID (for your app) Optional
  • Customer Since The day that your customer signed up for your product. not editable
  • Shipping Address The shipping address on file for your customer.
To edit any customer details, select the ID of the customer. You will be redirected to the customer's entry. Select "Actions" from the upper right hand menu to continue.

Pay close attention to the screen grab below. The screen grab below the information provided is from the Customer Details of the Subscription.

Custom Fields

If your Site contains a custom field, you can view which fields are applied to each Subscriber. Enable your Subscribers to enter custom field information via Public Signup Pages.

You may manually enter or change custom fields per Subscription here. Edit or delete custom fields associated with a Subscription here.

Components (Line-Items)

If your Subscriber selected components during signup, or you need to record components manually, select Components (Line Items) from the Summary Menu.

Each component associated with the Product your Subscriber has purchased will be displayed in this tab. Even if your Subscriber has not purchased any components, all components will be displayed.

This tab will display the following information about each component:

  • Name: The name of the component as it is displayed in the Product Family.
  • Type: Indicates type of component. Please see types of components for more information.
  • Date Added: Indicates the date that the component was added to the Chargify Site.
  • Current Usage: Specifies the amount of component used. Keep in mind metered components reset monthly, while quantity based stay in use into the future.
  • Cost: The current cost associated with the amount of component purchased.
  • Ops: Selecting Ops allows you to view the history associated with a Subscription, toggle on/off (for on off components), record usage (metered components), update quantity (quantity-based components)

For more information on configuring components to appear in Public Signup Pages, please see our documentation here.

Coupons

Since coupon application is a broad topic, we’ve created an entire section dedicated to applying coupons to a subscription. Please see our coupons documentation for more information.

Current Balance

Current balance is the outstanding current amount due on the account. However, if there is a credit on the account, this will be represented as a negative balance on the account.

For more information on adjusting balances, please see our adjustments documentation here.

Delete Customer Details

Select Delete to remove the customer entry. You may not delete a customer if they have a Subscriptions associated with the customer entry. To read more about deleting a Subscription, please see our documentation here.

Delete Payment Profile

To delete a payment profile, click the gear next to the payment profile you would like to delete and select “Delete credit card”.

Please pay special attention deleting payment profiles. This action cannot be undone.

Edit Credit Card Information

This will allow you to edit the Billing Address of the Subscription. This link will not allow you to edit a customer’s credit card. It will only allow you to edit the information about the credit card itself as shown below:

If you’d like to edit a customer’s credit card number, we suggest adding a new card, per instructions below.

Edit Customer Details

To edit any of the details of the customer, select Edit from the Action drop down menu. Pay close attention to this screen grab below, as well. You are able to edit the Customer Entry directly from the Customer tab.

Email Archives

If you have enabled to send your Subscriber notifications via Email Settings, you’ll be able to view the past 95 days of communications in Email archives. Emails do take a few moments to generate and appear. Please be patient as they will appear within 1-2 minutes of generation.

Selecting any of the emails will allow you to further inspect its contents for issues:

Chargify gives you the option to download the text or HTML of the email. Download the HTML file and drag it into a browser to see a fully rendered HTML version of your email if you have created an email with HTML contents.

Email Customer to Request Payment Update

This is a powerful tool used specifically to instruct a customer to update their credit card securely via self-service pages. Select Email Customer to Request Payment Update to send an email directly to your customer.

Expires At

If your subscriber has purchased a product that expires, an expires at date will appear as part of the subscription data. The expires at date indicates the day that the subscription will transition to expired, which is a dead state.

You have the option of altering the expires at date if needed. Select change next to the expires date to select the new date of expiration.

For more information on subscription states, please see our documentation here.

Invoices

When a subscription has invoices associated with it, you will be able to view current and past invoices in the subscription summary. Click the invoices on the side of your subscription summary to view existing invoices.

If you do not have access to the invoicing feature, based on your plan level, the invoice option will not appear.

Please see our section on Invoices by Subscription, for more information on how Invoices work within Subscriptions.

Next Billing Amount

Next Billing indicates the day/time that the Subscription will be charged for the next assessment period. This amount will include the following:

  • Product cost
  • Component cost
  • Taxes cost

Coupons

If there is a coupon applied, the discount will be calculated and factoered into this cost. Discounts will be applied and shown correctly.

Taxes

If taxes need to be applied to a subscription’s cost, the indicator of (plus taxes) will be noted in the next billing amount if you are using the Avalara Managed Tax service.

If you are using the custom taxes, supplied by Chargify, the next billable amount will be displayed into the billing amount. (Plus Taxes will not be shown if using custom taxes)

Components

Metered, on/off and quantity based components will be factored into the next billing amount. Please pay special attention to metered components, which charge at the end of the billing period.

Next Billing Date

The timestamp that indicates when capture of payment will be tried or retried. Please note the intentional duplication of the usage of Next Billing on this page. The usage of this version of next billing is meant to be seperately documented from the set of information under Next Billing further down the page.

Next Billing Date - Editing

You can edit the next billing date of a subscription by selecting “Change Billing Date” from their summary. From here, you can change any or all of the date attributes. After saving, the new date will be applied to the subscription.

Once a Subscriber’s “Next Billing” date arrives, within 20 minutes expect a renewal/transaction to be attempted. Chargify batches all transactions in 20 minute increments for processing efficiency. Requests to all gateways are sent at 0, 20, 40 minutes past the hour.

Next Billing Date - Calendar Billing

If a subscription has a snap day for calendar billing, you can edit the day that the subscription will snap to in Chargify. Select “Adjust Subscription Calendar Billing Date to Reflect Change in Next Billing Date” and your subscription will snap to the date set after the next scheduled renewal date.

If you deselect the box, the billing date will be changed for one recurring period to the new date. After this date arrives, the subscription will snap back to the original calendar billing date.

If you would like to edit the next snap day for a subscription, you must edit the snap date and the next recurring date as a two step process.

Editing the snap date and billing date

  1. Edit the snap date by selecting to “Adjust subscription calendar billing date”
  2. Choose the new snap date of the month
  3. Save
  4. Re-edit the next billing date to the desired next billing date by deselecting the “adjust subscription calendar billing date checkbox”
  5. Selecting the next billing date
  6. From here, the next snap date and the next billing date will reflect a new schedule.
Editing the next billing date of calendar-billing-based subscriptions will add a pro-rated charge in some cases.

Notes

Notes are strictly optional. We encourage our users to make accurate timely notes on recent activity, phone calls, payment plans etc. Within the main summary page, the most recent note will be displayed. You can select the notes tab to display all of the notes associated with a Subscription. Important notes can be flagged and marked with an asterisk next to the entry.

Paid Through Date displays the date in which the subscription has been paid for through in Chargify.

For example, if you pay for a 7-day subscription to a weekly newspaper subscription that begins on Sunday, the 1st of the month, you are paid through Saturday’s delivery.

Payment Details

If a Customer has a payment method attached to their account, you will be able to view some information about the card itself here. We mask all secure information, therefore displaying only the last 4 digits of the credit card number.

The address attached to the payment is the billing address for the Subscription. This is the same as the information entered in the billing address in the Public Signup Page.

Payment Method

The Payment Method for a Subscriber can be either Automatic or Invoice Billing.

You can change the payment method associated with a subscriber by selecting “Payment Method” in the subscriber’s summary.

When you elect to change the payment method, you are given the option to switch to the available alternate payment methods for the Site.

If you do not have the option to edit the payment method, please check your invoice settings. Visit Settings --> Invoice Billing to enable this feature.

As a reminder:

  • Automatic Billing: the customer is automatically charged when the Subscription renews.
  • Invoice Billing: the subscriber is not automatically charged when the Subscription is renewed. At the time of renewal, an invoice is created and optionally sent to the customer. You may record the payments manually against the invoice when you receive payment from the subscriber.

Processing Since / Failure / Failed At

When Chargify attempts to contact a gateway and encounters an error, we use these fields to indicate time stamps that pinpoint the time of the problem. Generally if the gateway is not available during the time a charge is assessed, we will mark the Subscription as a soft failure.

For assistance in resolving any subscriptions of this nature, please contact our support team.

Product

The current Product the Subscriber has purchased. This section of the Summary gives the Merchant two options. Change Version & Change Product.

  • Change Version: Selecting this option will allow you to migrate the Subscriber to a newer or older version of a Product you have edited. The Next Billing amount will immediately change to reflect an increase or decrease in the amount of the Product.

  • Change Product Selecting this option will allow you to immediately change your customer to a new product. No proration is done. For more information on product changes, please see our documentation here.

Changing a product has the following effects:

  • No proration is done - your customer is not charged or credited at this time (if you wish to have proration, then perform an upgrade/downgrade migration)
  • The selected product immediately becomes the current product listed in the Chargify API and UI
  • The period will not be affected.
  • The new product’s charges will be assessed at the start of the next period.
  • Components are unchanged and component charges will be assessed at the start of the next period
  • Note: if the new product belongs to a different product family, component usage will no longer show in the “Components (Line-Items)” tab since components belong to a specific product family.
  • If the new product does not have delayed initial charges, any any pending initial charges will not apply

Reset to $0

Resetting the balance will add an adjustment that will result in a $0 balance.

If you reset a Past Due or Unpaid subscription, it will immediately be activated. The subscription's status will be Active after resetting the balance in this manner.

Retry/Reactivate

If you manually reset the balance through Actions –> Adjust balance, use this method to make a past due or unpaid subscription active.

When you attempt to retry a past due or unpaid subscription, the following will occur:

  • This subscription will be immediately retried
  • The customer will be charged their current balance
  • If payment is successful, the subscription will be activated
  • There is no “undo” at this time, so please be sure before you press the “Retry Subscription” button

If you select "Retry/Reactivate" for a Subscription that is in Dunning, this will not affect the existing dunning steps or schedule. This action simply replays the current dunning step. The associated webhook for current day's Dunning Event will be replayed with a different time stamp.

Referral Code

Once referrals have been enabled, a unique referral code will be created for every subscription. You can obtain the referral code by visiting the subscription summary page for the subscription, or by fetching the subscription from the API.

For more information on referrals, please see our documentation here.

Statements

Statements can be located within each subscription. Click on the left side of the subscription summary to access a list of current statements for a subscription.

Please see our section on Statements, for more information on how Statements work within Subscriptions.

Status

The current state of the subscription. Please see the documentation for Subscription States.

Subscriber Since

The date of creation of the Subscription. In the event that you have created a subscription that begins billing in the future, this date will reflect the date that the subscription was created.

Tax Exempt Customer

You can manually designate a subscription tax exempt from the subscription summary. If a subscriber purchases a product that is taxable, they will not have to pay the tax on the product or components if they are marked tax exempt.

To change a subscriber to tax exempt, select change next to Tax Exempt Customer and you will be directed to the customer entry. Select the dropdown under Tax Exempt and change this option to yes.

For more information on tax exempt subscribers/customers, please see our documentation here.

Total Revenue

The total revenue, from the time of the subscription signup. This figure includes revenue from paid invoices, paid statements, one time charges, and component costs.

Transactions

The transactions tab gives you insight into the recent activty on the Subscription.

Each transaction contains a wealth of data that will help you and your Subscriber understand why charges were assessed, etc. Transacations are

  • ID
  • Date
  • Type
  • Memo
  • Amount
  • Sub Balance
  • Status

Selecting Actions from the drop down menu will allow you to view the details on each of the transactions. For more information on transactions, please see our documentation here.

Verified for ACH / eCheck Payments

If you are connected to a gateway that accepts ACH (eCheck) as a payment option. You will need to manually approve your Subscriber to submit ACH as a payment option. To do this, select change in the Subscription Summary. You will be directed to the customer entry, where you can enable ACH payments.

For more information on ACH payments, please see our documentation here.