Reproducing Billing Behavior

Customer Impact: Customers being imported into Recurly may be confused by the “New Subscription” emails that are normally sent by our platform. This is why Recurly recommends creating all subscriptions to start at once using the trial period parameter, rather than future start date subscriptions (which would then prevent legitimate new subscribers from receiving their emails).
Merchant Impact: none.
Work to Do: Disable “new subscription” email template during the short window in which subscriptions are being created. Re-enable when done.

Customer Impact: During a transition between billing providers, customers want to remain informed, and want no overall impact to their billing. One of the major areas is in their bill cycle date, so work should be done by the merchant to ensure their bill date remains the same across providers.
Merchant Impact: During a transition between billing providers, merchants should maintain the bill cycle date to help with revenue recognition while allowing changes to immediately take place in the new platform. Creating subscriptions in a “trial” period allows them to activate immediately without recognizing any revenue since that was already processed in another platform. Customizing the trial end date also means a customer’s original bill cycle date will be respected.
Work to Do: Merchant will create a subscription on the account using the Subscription Create API call (https://dev.recurly.com/docs/create-subscription) and customizing the trial_ends_at date to match the customer’s original bill cycle date.

Customer Impact: Customers who have pending credits or charges in a legacy system will want those adjustments replicated on their Recurly site.
Merchant Impact: n/a
Work to Do: Merchant will use the Create an Adjustment API call to apply adjustments to an account: https://dev.recurly.com/docs/list-an-accounts-adjustments

Customer Impact: A customer may have a canceled subscription, but it is still active through the end of their current bill cycle.
Merchant Impact: Merchant needs to replicate a subscription on the account.
Work to Do: Merchant will add a subscription per the instructions in “Aligning Original Bill Cycle Date”. Once the subscription has been added with a custom bill cycle end date, the merchant then issues a subscription cancellation call (https://dev.recurly.com/docs/cancel-subscription). This will terminate the customer’s subscription at the end of their bill cycle.

Customer Impact: A customer may have a pending subscription in the legacy system set to take effect at the end of their current bill cycle.
Merchant Impact: Merchant needs to replicate this change on the customer’s account.
Work to Do: Merchant should add a subscription per the instructions in “Aligning Original Bill Cycle Date”. Once the subscription has been added with a custom bill cycle end date, the merchant should then issue a subscription change API call (https://dev.recurly.com/docs/update-subscription) with a timeframe of “at renewal”. The customer’s new terms will apply once the subscription renews.

Customer Impact: A customer may have custom or grandfathered pricing that needs to be recognized in Recurly.
Merchant Impact: Merchant needs to account for custom pricing without creating a burden on reporting.
Work to Do: When a merchant creates a subscription per the instructions in “Aligning Original Bill Cycle Date”, they can supply a custom unit_amount_in_cents variable that will override pricing for that user. Alternatively, if the merchant wants to track contra-revenue, they can create (https://dev.recurly.com/docs/create-coupon) and redeem (https://dev.recurly.com/docs/redeem-a-coupon-before-or-after-a-subscription) before adding the subscription to the account at default pricing.

Customer Impact: After legacy payment processor has exported data, a customer may want to update billing information.
Merchant Impact: Merchant will not want the customer to update in their legacy platform since Recurly will not receive that data.
Work to Do: The merchant should send the user to Recurly to update billing information (https://dev.recurly.com/docs/update-an-accounts-billing-info-token), which will also create the account for the user. Recurly will not override any data in their system.

Merchant Impact: Merchant should allow subscription changes until the final pull of data for creating subscriptions in Recurly. At that point, merchant should put up a system maintenance window, until the customer can then update the subscription in Recurly.
Work to Do: n/a

Merchant Impact: Merchant should allow subscription cancellations up until the final pull of data for creating subscription in Recurly. At that point, merchant should put up a system maintenance window, until the customer can then cancel the subscription within Recurly.
Work to Do: n/a

See Enterprise Subscription Management in Action