Customer Properties: Billing Periods

Sections on this page:

• Managing Billing Periods
• Create a New Billing Period
• Updating a Billing Period
• Managing an Empty Billing Period
• Financial Impact of Changing Billing Periods

Managing Billing Periods

Each subscription that a customer has is contained in a single Billing Period. Conversely, a Billing Period can contain many subscriptions, if they are all set up to charge on the same day and at the same frequency.

This page allows you to manipulate the Billing Periods for a customer, which can be useful for example when:

• A customer has one or more subscriptions which are billing on the 9th of every month, and they would like to change them so they are billed on the 15th of the month instead.
• A customer has two subscriptions both billing on the 9th, but they would prefer to have one of them billing on the 9th and the other on the 15th.

Create a New Billing Period

Click Create Billing Period if you want to make a new billing period and move some of the customer's subscriptions into it. You can use this, for example, to move one of the customer's subscriptions from billing on the 20th of the month to the 1st of the month, without impacting the other subscriptions.

Enter the billing period information including the number of periods and the frequency (monthly or yearly) you would like to use. If it's a monthly frequency, you can choose an Invoice Day; if it's a yearly frequency, you can choose an Invoice Day and Month. Fusebill will show you the date on which this billing period will next recharge.

Click Create to create the Billing Period.

Note: Nothing will actually happen with this billing period until you place a subscription into it.

Updating a Billing Period

Click the Details button on any existing Billing Period to bring up its properties.

The header shows you which type of Billing Period this is and its Invoice Day (or Day and Month, if yearly). Click Modify to change the Invoice Day/Month.

You will also see a list of Subscriptions which belong to this period. You can move a subscription to a different Billing Period by clicking the Move button. You will get a pop-up like the one below, which will allow you to either create a new Billing Period for this subscription or attach it to an existing Billing Period.

Note: The frequency of a subscription cannot be changed.

Managing an Empty Billing Period

If you remove all subscriptions from a Billing Period, you can then delete the empty Billing Period by clicking the Delete button which will appear with the Details button on the right-hand side of the Billing Period grid.

Note: A deleted Billing Period cannot be restored.

Billing Periods can also be managed from the Subscriptions overview page; see Subscribing a Customer to a Plan.

Financial Impact of Changing Billing Periods

There are financial impacts to changing a subscription's billing period. Here are some scenarios to consider.

• A monthly billing period has a billing date of the 1st. On the 15th of the month, a charge is added to a subscription, and the charge is set to pro-rate, a bill at end of period. Sometime after the 15th, the billing date is changed to the 6th of the (next) month. The end of period charge will be pro-rated to the old billing date (the 1st), not the new billing date (the 6th).
• If the current billing date is the 1st and you change it to the 6th, the customer will get 6 extra days of service "for free" in the next month; or, you can consider that the current billing period has been extended to 36 days (assuming a 30-day month). There is no pro-ration of charges to account for the change in billing date.
• Conversely, if the current billing date is the 30th, and on the 20th of the month you change it to the 22nd, you are "shortening" the current billing cycle by 8 days. Again, charges are not pro-rated to account for this change.
• Pro-rated charges which are added after the date change will be pro-rated based on the new billing date, not the previous one.

Of course, all of these scenarios work similarly with annual plans and there are many possibilities to consider.

Tip: It is recommended that you try any billing date changes in a test environment first, allow billing to run, and examine the results before you implement the change in your production account.