Subscriptions and Automatic billing

Questions
1

Our service has a few subscription types. Some have free trials and some don’t.

We’re really struggling with how Subscriptions are managed in Square. First, a subscription without a $0 phase (free trial) seems to be getting created as Active instead of Pending without a payment.

We wanted to resolve the subscription when the user added a payment method - but if I’m not mistaken Orders that create Invoices cannot be paid via the Payments API.

So then I thought if the user is signing up without a free trial, we can extend the start_date until we get payment info. This seemed to give us everything we were looking for. I was thinking when the user provided Payment information we could then go ahead and change their start date. No dice, start_date is immutable.

I want a user to be able to register for our service and I want us to be able to take care of the payment without the user having to “Pay Invoice” from a Square Email. Is this even possible without us doing most of the heavy lifting on our end?

2

The customer will alway get an email from Square but, it can be a paid invoice email. With the Subscriptions API you can create the card on file for the customer and add that card_id thats used for regular payments. :slightly_smiling_face:

3

With the Subscriptions API you can create the card on file for the customer and add that card_id thats used for regular payments.

I don’t think that will work for this scenario, though, which is the scenario we are in.

Here’s how it looks:

  1. Customer signs up for a subscription on Jan 1st. Square creates the subscription as Active, and first invoice is created. Square has invoice listed as due Jan 1st.

  2. Customer adds card to file on Jan 3rd.

Now how do we go back and charge the invoice from Jan 1st?

4

There isn’t a way to manually trigger a payment for the first invoice that was generated with the newly created card on file. You would have to wait till for the next billing cycle. Once the next billing cycle occurs then a new invoice would be paid with the card on file and it would also charge for the outstanding amount from the first phase.

Is there a reason your not creating the card on file when the customer signs up for the subscription? :slightly_smiling_face: