Recurring Billing payments are charged automatically on a recurring basis based on the schedule you set for the Recurring Billing Profile.
When making the Recurring Billing Profile, you can set the schedule to any recurring period, whether it’s weekly, monthly, every three days, etc.
Must know:
- If a Recurring Billing Profile is put on hold or closed and then re-opened at another date, the system will process any missed payments on that profile. If you don’t want back payments to be processed, we suggest closing that profile and creating a new one.
- Each recurring payment bills for the period following the payment. For example, if you charge a monthly payment on June 1st, then the payment covers all of June. This is important to keep in mind when creating any profiles with a billing expiry date.
- The Recurring Billing schedule cannot be changed after the second payment is processed. You will need to close or delete the profile to edit/create a new one.
How do I set the Recurring Billing schedule?
- Create a Recurring Billing Profile.
- Select your preferences for ‘Start Date’, ‘Expiry Date’, ‘Bill Every’, and ‘Second Billing’.
- Once you’ve entered the billing schedule, at the bottom of the Billing Profile, you’ll automatically see a preview showing the first three billing dates and amounts:
Good to know:
- Start Date: The date of the first charge.
- The Start Date can be the middle of a standard billing period—in which case, the consumer will be charged a prorated amount. (For example, if you charge payments on the 1st of each month, but you take the first payment on January 15, then the consumer only pays for the second half of the billing period. This is automatically calculated by our system.)
- Expiry Date: The date the Recurring Billing Profile closes automatically.
- Keep in mind that each recurring payment bills for the month following the payment. For example, if you take payments on the 1st of the month, and you want to charge the final amount on August 1, then you should set the expiry date to August 31. If the expiry date is any earlier than the last day of the month, then the cardholder will be charged a prorated amount.
- ‘Bill at end of the month’ should be checked if you want to process payments on the last day of the month (30th, 31th, or 28th). Choose to bill every 1 month to use this option.
- ‘Never Expires’ is the default setting on Recurring Billing profiles. Uncheck this box if you want to specify an expiry date on the account.
- Bill Every: Use these fields to select the billing frequency.
- For example, “Bill Every 1 Month.” You can bill any period of days, months, or weeks. There is also a yearly billing option, but if you set your billing frequency to periods of years, credit cards may expire before the recurring billing schedule kicks in.
- Second Billing: The date the billing schedule officially begins.
- By default, this field automatically shows one full billing period after the start date. However, this can be modified if the start date is in the middle of the billing period.
- You will get an email notification summarizing the recurring billing transactions that were processed for a particular date (the email subject is ‘Recurring Billing Notification’). It shows how many transactions were approved and declined. For each declined transaction, the email also shows the profile associated with the decline.