Calendar Billing

SubscriptionFlow offers endless billing flexibility with calendar billing. This feature allows you to bill customers in advance or bill them at the end of the billed term. You can decide which day of the month customers get billed and for what elapsed term.

This guide shows you how to enable calendar billing.

1.1. How to Enable Calendar Billing

1.2. How Invoices are Generated with Calendar Billing

1.1. How to Enable Calendar Billing

1. Log in to land you on the Dashboard. Navigate to the top right corner of your screen and click on the ⚙️ icon to enter Administration Settings.

2. Click ‘Preferences’ under Customization.

3. Within Preferences, click on the ‘Invoices’ tab.

4. Scroll down to Calendar Billing, and tick mark ‘Enable Bill Run’. Tick marking ‘Enable Bill Run’ will present you with three dropdown menus, from which you will be able to choose the calendar billing day, the bill run target day, and the billing mode. 

5. Choosing the right Calendar Billing Day is important because this is the date at which the invoice for your customer will be generated. In this guide, we chose the customer billing day to be the first of the month, which means that your customer will be billed for their subscription at the beginning of every month.

6. Choosing the right Bill Run Target Day is important because this is the last date for which your customer will be billed in each billing cycle. In this guide, we chose the bill run target day to be the end of the previous month, which means that your customer will be billed for using your subscription up till the end of the previous month. For example, if the billing date is the 1st of August, the billing period will extend from the subscription start date to the 31st of July (the previous month).

7. Choosing the correct Calendar Billing Mode is important because this is what determines whether the invoice will be created alongside subscription activation or at the end of the first billing cycle i.e. the start or the close of the billing period.

8. Then, scroll down and click ‘Save Changes’. A green pop-up notification at the top right corner of the screen will indicate that the changes have been successfully saved.

How Invoices are Generated with Calendar Billing

1. Go to the Subscriptions module.  

2. This takes you to a list of all your subscriptions. Click ‘Create Subscription’.

3. To learn how to create a subscription in detail, go to this guide. Choose a customer from the dropdown menu, the subscription type i.e. termed or evergreen, and a subscription start date at which the subscription will be activated. 

4. For this guide, we chose this subscription for our customer, Judith Priscatella. The start date of Ms. Priscatella’s subscription was 1st July 2024, her bill run target day is the end of the previous month, and her customer billing day is 1st of the month. This means that SubscriptionFlow will generate an invoice for Ms. Priscatella on 1st August 2024, in which she will be billed for the subscription period between the 1st and the 31st of July 2024.

5. To look at the invoice for Ms. Priscatella, go to the Invoices module. If ‘Enable Bil Run’ is not checked, an invoice would be automatically generated as the system is set to collect Advance Payments by default. As we have enabled calendar billing previously, no invoice for this subscription will exist immediately. Instead the system will wait till the 1st of the month to generate this invoice and collect the payment.