#spencersr - prepaid subscriptions
tulip needle
Is the pre-paying part the part you are looking for advice on? Or are you asking about that plan more generally
You could probably accomplish those with a trial period of those lengths and charging a one time fee up front
rotund hamlet
Well our customers have 1-3 year terms.. sometimes they want to pay 2 years up front instead of be billed annually.
We ALSO have monthly subscriptions on their account which negates the utility of credit to advance payment on specific future invoices.
OK... so for a 3 year paid up front I would have 3 back to back subscriptions.. one has a 1 year trial and 1 has a 2 year trial. The customer will just have to deal with the wonky dates in the invoice?
ah ok.. it shows the proper dates in the invoice.
and it tallies up properly.
We wanted to have annual subscriptions set up and then say 3 cycles.. but it didn't math it out properly.
Once we restricted it to 1 cycle it calculated it as expected
FWIW.. I'll be in Austin, TX if there is somebody that wants to watch me use stripe and listen to me say "Well.. this is weird.. why is it doing that?"
Yeh.. it sets the billing cycle start date after the trial ends and then won't allow me to pay in full
tulip needle
Still thinking on this. So what about that behavior isn't working as you would like or expect?
rotund hamlet
We can only apply or write off payments to a single year at a time for a multi year subscription. We can't separate into individual years and pay them off in advance unless I can set up a payment object and apply it to a future subscription somehow?
And ALSO when we set the start date for 1/1/2022 and select 2 cycles it calculates a lower price than if we select 1 cycle which shows the correct price. Typing in the dates manually doesn't appear to make a difference either.
I think lets just skip on this.. we only have 2 customers that have been handled this way and we will just deal with their invoice and mark it as paid when it comes up next.
noble mauve
Hi there 👋 jumping in to give @tulip needle some bandwidth.
Still trying to wrap my head around this scenario, but you can use credit balances that count towards future invoices. The drawback is that you can't specify which invoice a credit balance will apply to, they'll always apply to the next invoice.
https://stripe.com/docs/billing/customer/balance
