#Gabelbart

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

tidal oysterBOT
fierce hatch
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hi! I can try to offer advice but not sure I have all the context.
Is this an accurate example :
a customer has a subscription from Oct 1 2021 -> Oct 1 2022, they paid $100 on Oct 1 2021
you are migrating now to Stripe and starting a subscription on Sep 14 2022.

you want <something> to happen with that $100

low pebble
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Exactly

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Sry for the delay, i had my boss on the phone.

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There might be a way how we convince our client to accept the stripe-credit setup, but i need to be sure about the major question of our client: is there a way a customer can have his positive balance transferred to his bank account?

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eg "I'd like to pay out my positive credit balance"

fierce hatch
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so I'm not entirely sure I know what outcome you'd like here. There are many options. To be clear, why do they have a balance at all? To me if the scenario was the one I posted I would :

  • create the subscription today
  • pass billing_cycle_anchor:<Oct 1 2022> and proration_behaviour:none to our API
  • that has the effect that no payment is taken today, the first Stripe invoice will be on Oct 1 2022 and will charge the $100 for the upcoming year.

There are some other options that involve prorating charges, really depends what you're looking for, and I'm not quite following.

Ultimately if they don't have any history as a Stripe customer you can't really pay out their balance(you can only send them money by e.g. refunding a previous payment in Stripe)

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low pebble
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Maybe I can describe the situation a little bit better:

  • Right now customers can pay for 1-n years in advance
  • When migrating they will have 'used up' some of that amount they payed in advance

Lets say the user paid for 3 years (300$) - half a year ago. So he has left 250€. This leaves me with to problems: 1. it appears that i cant create subscriptions for more than 12 months payment intervals; 2. I might not be able to get the payment anchor from the old system (don't ask 🤦‍♂️ 😦 - the current system state is depressing)

fierce hatch
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so he paid $300 and has three years of access. I don't really understand why you have to give him the prorated $250 back if access is continuing and you're just transitioning to a new billing system.

  1. it appears that i cant create subscriptions for more than 12 months payment intervals
    true, this is blocked by default because it rarely makes sense and card networks discourage it. If I give you my card details today and you don't charge them for 3 years, there's an incredibly high change that it will decline, or I will have completely forgotten you exist and will dispute the charge when I see it. We do have settings we can enable on your account to allow for longer intervals though for merchants who really need it and write in.

What you could do is create a yearly subscription and use a 100% coupon with a limited number of redemptions so that the first year or two just cycle the subscription and "charge" $0 invoices. That could be an option.

  1. I might not be able to get the payment anchor from the old system
    That does make it quite hard. You'd probably want to just make some default assumption like pick the start of a quarter like Jan/Apr/Aug 1 that feels reasonable and align the Stripe subscription to that
low pebble
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That does make it quite hard. You'd probably want to just make some default assumption like pick the start of a quarter like Jan/Apr/Aug 1 that feels reasonable and align the Stripe subscription to that

The client will unfortunately never accept this.

However, they can somehow provide me the exact amount that 'is left' of that payment.

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We don't want to give them back the money, thats the point, the idea is that they can use it up with their subscription in the stripe environment. Did i get the purpose of the credit balance wrong?

fierce hatch
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well if they paid $300 on April 1 this year for three years of access, so from their perspective isn't the next thing they expect to see this :

  • they have access to the system for 3 years
  • in April/March 2025 you bill them

the latter you can set up for by creating a yearly subscription in Stripe with appropriate use of billing_cycle_anchor and coupons

low pebble
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Another problem is, that the customers will get another discount based on how long they have been customers and as far as i understand i can only use one coupong with stripe checkout.

fierce hatch
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true, we don't support mutliple coupons on a single subscription today

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so then perhaps you could use $0 Pricing plan for the yearly plan, and then change it later to a paid one either manually or with SubscriptionSchedules. This is getting extremely complex though.

low pebble
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It is complex indeed, i had to wrap my head around so many demands of the client by now...

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We are already using schedules because of the german customer-protection laws which disallow yearly subscriptions that prolong automatically.....

low pebble
fierce hatch
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seems impossible to me for you to have a balance exact to a cent if you can't even get the previous billing date from the existing system.

low pebble
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But is my intention with the credit balance so wrong? The way i understood it was thats somehow how its meant to be used?! Like a deposit that can be used up by the customer with its subscriptions.

fierce hatch
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The way a credit balance works in Stripe is you say a customer has a balance of X amount. Say it's $35. Every invoice generated for that customer will have the balance applied against it. So say that customer has a monthly subscription of $10 a month starting today. The following happens :

  • Invoice Sep 14 : $10 ; applied balance $10 ;amount paid $0 ; balance $25
  • Invoice Oct 14 : $10 ; applied balance $10 ;amount paid $0 ; balance $15
  • Invoice Nov 14 : $10 ; applied balance $10 ;amount paid $0 ; balance $5
  • Invoice Dec 14 : $10 ; applied balance $5 ;amount paid $5 ; balance $0
  • Invoice Jan 14 : $10 ; applied balance $0 ;amount paid $10 ; balance $0
    ....
low pebble
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🙂

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But can the customer ask stripe to transfer this balance to its bank account? Also, can the customer use this balance for payments to other Services not owned by me?

fierce hatch
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But can the customer ask stripe to transfer this balance to its bank account?
no, that's not possible really (since where does the real money come from? the balance is just on paper, Stripe can't just give them money that wasn't inputted, and you can't send arbitrary funds outside the context of a transaction without needing to do KYC and use our Connect product). per my earlier comment :
Ultimately if they don't have any history as a Stripe customer you can't really pay out their balance(you can only send them money by e.g. refunding a previous payment in Stripe)

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Also, can the customer use this balance for payments to other Services not owned by me?
not entirely sure what you mean, but the balance is a concept tied to the specific cus_xxxx Customer object on your own Stripe account and that's it, it applies to invoices created for that cus_xxx on your account

low pebble
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I believe i will go with the balance, this seems the right approach for me, this way the customers can also use it up for other services my client wants to offer with this application.

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Thank you for your help, i learned a lot! 🙂 I really like working with stripe but it feels like i enterd on the highest level of the learning curve due the high demands of our client.

fierce hatch
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happy to help