#brayden

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

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restive hamlet
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We'd like to implement a workflow in which customers are able to enter payment details for an invoice that will then be put into a "draft" or "pending" state and upon actual payment will start a subscription backdated to the date the draft invoice was created.

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I'm seeing some documentation around pending subscriptions, but it seems they are only available for 24 hours before they are marked incomplete or cancelled.

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Is there a better way to accomplish this via an invoice route? Would it make sense to create a pending invoice, and then cancel that invoice and start a backdated subscription upon payment? This seems a bit unintuitive, so I'm just kind of trying to ascertain the best way to go about this.

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The main motivation for this workflow is that we need the ability to approve or deny a customer's ability to start a subscription with us for fraud detection purposes. There needs to be a several day window available where someone can decide if we want to capture payment from a user or deny their subscription application, but we still want to capture payment information from them to keep them from having to come back and provide it upon approval.

tall timber
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Is there a reason that adding a free trial won't work in this case? It allows you to have the Payment Method on file without charging it and also allows you to cancel the Invoice and Subscription at any point up to the end of the trial

restive hamlet
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If the free trial is used, can the subscription then be backdated?

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Like, let's say on Jan 1st the person applies for the subscription and gets free trial

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On Jan 5th we approve, can the subscription be backdated to start on Jan 1st?

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This is very important.

tall timber
restive hamlet
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and I could do that with the billing_cycle_anchor?

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So I would essentially set the trial to end now, with the subscription updated with the billing_cycle_anchor to a date in the past?

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and this would charge the customer for the full amount of the invoice with a start date of the backdated date?

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We only support annual, or semi-annual payments, so we don't need any like monthly recurring charges. Just need the sub to renew at the same rate on the backdated date + 1 year, if that makes sense.

tall timber
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I think you would likely not use trials if you're back-dating subscriptions. You would just track when they first added their payment method and then set billing_cycle_anchor and also backdate_start_date to the past date

restive hamlet
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Okay, so just collect the payment details and push them onto the Stripe customer and track when they've done that, but only create the back dated subscription whenever we've approved it?

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I had considered this as well, but didn't quite know if this would work correctly.

tall timber
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That will be a bit easier than trying to use trials

restive hamlet
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Makes a lot of sense. Thanks a bunch!