Your customers may want to pause their subscription temporarily instead of canceling it altogether, for the following reasons:
You can pause a subscription in case there are issues with receiving payments from your customer, so until you have resolved the payment issues, you can keep the subscription on hold.
Subscriptions placed on pause will not be accounted in Churn, hence your reports will be accurate and will reflect the right numbers.
Such subscriptions will also be identified by a distinct status - paused. This will help in tracking these subscriptions in Chargebee and communicate better with 3rd party systems. Say, an order tracking system can identify whether to ship the goods or not for that period based on whether the subscription is paused.
You can pause the subscription from your Chargebee site or via API. Your customers can also pause the subscription via the Customer Self-serve Portal.
Subscriptions can be placed on pause for a defined period if the resume date/time is known, else can be placed on pause indefinitely. Chargebee will not provide credits for the unused billing period. However, you can choose to manually provide credits to your customers, if required.
You can enable Pause subscription in your Chargebee site at Settings > Configure Chargebee > Pause Subscription > Enable.
Configure the default settings on how to handle the subscriptions, invoices, charges when you pause or resume -
Choose defaults for Pause:
| Action | Select a default |
|---|---|
| When Pause Subscription is invoked | You can choose to default to Pause immediately or Pause on Next renewal. |
| For how long should the subscription be paused | You can choose to default to Pause indefinitely or pause till a specific date/time. |
| If there are unbilled charges | Either retain the existing charges as Unbilled charges or invoice them |
| If there are invoices in Dunning | Either Stop Dunning or continue Dunning |
Choose defaults for Resume:
| Action | Select a default |
|---|---|
| When Resume Subscription is invoked | You can choose to default to Resume immediately or Resume on Next renewal. |
| If there are charges | You can choose what happens to the charges raised for a subscription that is resumed after the current billing period. |
| If there are unpaid invoices from previous terms | You can choose what happens to the unpaid invoices from the previous terms of the subscription. On resumption, all the current term invoices will be collected. |
You can choose to allow overriding the default settings via the Chargebee site and-or via API, when a subscription is paused/resumed. When overriding is locked, users will not be able to change the settings.
Only subscriptions in ACTIVE state can be paused.
Once Pause Subscription has been enabled for your site, to pause an active subscription:
Navigate to the subscription details page.
Click Pause Subscription on the Action panel.
The defaults defined in Chargebee settings will be preloaded and the necessary options can be overridden, if allowed.
Choose when you want to pause the subscription:
You can pause the subscription via the Pause Subscription API .
If the settings allow, your customers can pause and resume their subscriptions using the Self-serve Portal:
If you use Chargebee's Single Page Customer Portal for your customers:
If the settings allow, then your customers can Pause or Resume subscriptions from the Hosted Pages Portal.
Your customers can choose to pause the subscription immediately or end of the current billing term.
They can also choose to resume a paused subscription manually or on specific date.
You can deal with unbilled charges while pausing a subscription as below:
When the subscription is paused, you can choose to continue dunning or stop dunning for related invoices.
If a discount is applied to a subscription and the subscription is paused, the coupon duration will not be extended. The coupon may expire even if the subscription is paused.
A subscription in paused state can be resumed at any point in time.
If your customer has requested to resume or payment issues have been resolved, or any other reason due to which the product/service should begin to be delivered, you can resume the subscription in Chargebee.
If a resume date/time is defined at the time of pause, the date will be preloaded and you can choose to modify it. If resume date/time wasn't mentioned, the subscription will be paused indefinitely. You can choose a new resume date/time or resume immediately.
You can resume a paused subscription immediately or on a specific date/time.
You can choose to invoice the charges immediately or add to unbilled charges.
You can resume a paused subscription via the Resume Subscription API .
When a subscription resumes, it can resume within the billing term or not, here's the calculation for the:
If you have Portal v2 enabled for your Chargebee site, your customers can resume the subscription from the portal (immediately or schedule resumption on a specific date).
This is when a subscription is paused and resumed within the billing term of the subscription.
Say, the subscription renews on the 1st of every month. If the subscription is paused on 15th and resumed on the 25th, this is considered as an in-term resumption.
When a subscription resumes in-term, new charges will not be created.
When a paused subscription resumes after the renewal date/time, it is considered as an out-of-term resumption.
Say, the subscription renews on the 1st of every month. If the subscription is paused on the 15th and resumed on the 10th of the next month, this is considered as an out-of-term resumption.
A new invoice will be generated on the 10th of March (in this example).
If you disable the pause subscription feature,
1. What will happen to the non-recurring charges if the subscription is resumed before the end of the billing term?
If the subscription resumes before the end of the billing term, non-recurring charges will not be invoiced right away. Said charges will be added to the invoice of the subscription renewal.