With our recent release we continue to enhance our recurring billing offering. We take an iterative approach to development as well as our release schedule. These continued improvements and frequent releases are what help us make payment processing easier for our merchants. Take a look below for a view into our recent enhancements.
Are your customers current with their payments?
We now track a balance associated with subscriptions. The balance will show you exactly how much money you are owed for every subscription. Typically, active subscriptions will have a zero balance, and past due subscriptions will have a balance showing what they owe you. One exception to this is a subscription which was upgraded and had the proration amount added to the balance (a feature we will talk about later in the post). In a future release, we'll expand balance to accommodate proration on downgrades.
You can also see what the charge will be for the next billing period. We have added next billing period amount. This, along with the existing balance (if any), is what will be charged at the start of the next billing period. This amount includes add-ons, discounts, and the base subscription price. We have exposed next bill amount in the past, but it's deprecated now and will be removed in the next major version of our client libraries.
Paid Through Date
Previously, to determine the date a subscription was paid through you would need to look at a few different attributes of the subscription. This was a bit clunky so we've made it easier and made it it's own field.
All of the above fields balance, next billing period amount, and paid through date are displayed in the control panel on the transaction details page. They are also exposed in the client libraries.
Additional Proration Options
Now when upgrading a subscription with proration enabled you have a couple of options if the proration transaction fails. You can now opt to have the failed prorated amount added to the balance, you can cancel the update or you can disable proration and save the update. When you disable proration the changes to the subscription will go into effect the next billing period. These options can be selected on the subscription edit page in the control panel.
There is a proration charge flag which determines how failures are handled when updating a subscription via the client libraries. If set to true, failed proration charges result in the subscription not being updated. If false, a failed proration amount is instead added to the balance, and the subscription is updated as directed. Below are links to our documentation where you can find more information.
Docs: Ruby | PHP | Python | Java | .NET
We hope you find these enhancements helpful. As always, we love getting feedback. If you have any please send us an email at support@braintreepayments.com