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After using Chargify, the best recurring billing system on the market, for the last year, we’ve figured out a few Chargify tips to help you use the product even more.

Have one customer with multiple subscriptions?
We do, and the biggest complaint from the customer was that they couldn’t tell which statement referred to which subscription they had. When someone signs up using the Chargify hosted page, the Organization field always comes through as “None Given” (which the hosted page does not have a field for Organization). However, you can edit it later by clicking on the Subscriber in the Chargify interface and editing the Organization field.

 

Tip: even after editing the org field, if you try to create a new statement on the fly, it won’t work. You have to wait until the system generates a new statement at the next billing cycle and it will show up under the name.

Want to upgrade a customer, but their subscription expired?
We have a subscription that has a one-time fee and no recurring price, but figured out we set up the subscription wrong initially. At first, we set the plan to “expire” after 30 days, mainly because we didn’t want to inflate subscriber counts, so those counts could be reserved for monthly subscribers.

Well, if the customer wanted to upgrade after the plan expired, you would have to have them sign up all over again. Now, you have two options: 1) leave the subscription open so it doesn’t expire, so you can upgrade them at any time later on; or 2) if the subscription does expire, reactivate the subscription, then you should see the Upgrade/Downgrade option.

Tip: make sure you put all of your upgradeable subscriptions in the same Family. In the current Chargify configuration, you can’t upgrade a subscription in Family A to a subscription in Family B.

Should my subscription be set to renew in 30 days, or 1 month?
It’s actually a great question because as far as I can tell, the billing cycles in Chargify behave differently for either option. Let’s say it is January 31st and your subscription renewal is set to 30 days. The next bill should run on March 2nd. If you chose the monthly billing option, your next bill would run on February 28th.

Observation: we’ve observed that if a subscriber signs up on a 29th, 30th or 31st day of any given month, and you have the monthly option chosen, those subscription billing cycles will apparently move to the 28th of the month – probably to keep it consistent in months like February.

You have to appreciate all of the complexities that go into writing recurring billing software. If any reps at Chargify would like to add to (or correct) what I’ve written, please feel free!