Installments and Subscriptions

You choose Installment Plan or Subscription to bill a customer on a regular schedule. Each answers a different question, set out below.

	Installment Plan	Subscription
What is fixed	A total the customer owes	An amount per cycle
Does it end?	Always, by design	Normally never
Typical use	The $8,500 Q4 expansion over four months	$2,125 per month, with the end date agreed separately
On screen	Bill until: N payments, Total reached, End date	Ends: Never or On date

The distinction is not cosmetic. An installment plan divides a number you already know; a subscription commits to a number per cycle and keeps charging it. Picking the wrong one gives the customer the wrong bill.

Choosing Between Them

Ask yourself: do you know the total?

• Yes: Emily Ross owes $8,500 for Summit Technologies’ Q4 expansion and pays it off. That is an installment plan. Under Bill until, choose N payments, Total reached or End date, then enter Number of Payments (2 to 600), Per-Installment Amount or End Date, respectively.
• No: Emily Ross agrees to $2,125 per month, with the subscription ending on the agreed date or continuing until stopped. That is a subscription.

To end a subscription on a date, set Ends to On date and enter Subscription Ends On. You bill the amount you set every cycle. With an installment plan, you set Bill until to End date and enter End Date to divide the total across the available cycles.

Page	What it covers
Set up an installment plan	The 3 Bill until options and what you enter for each
Set up a subscription	Billing every cycle with Ends set to Never or On date
Pause, resume or stop	Interrupting either one temporarily, or ending it for good
Review history	Every charge either one produced, including failures

What They Share

Both are set up from the Charge action, both run in the background once scheduled, and both record every charge they attempt.

Both offer 6 frequencies: weekly, fortnightly (labelled Biweekly on screen), monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and yearly. The setting is labelled Frequency on an installment plan and Bills Every on a subscription.

Both can charge a saved payment method, or send a fresh payment link every cycle if you would rather not hold one.

Before You Set Either One Up

You need one of the following:

• A saved payment method for the customer, or
• A willingness to let ChargeOn send a fresh payment link every cycle instead. Choose Payment Link as the payment type during setup. No card or bank details are collected up front, and it waits for the customer to pay each link.

Schedule the billing jobs first

Ask an administrator to schedule the background jobs before setting up billing. The jobs process each plan’s charges on its billing dates. See Part 7 of the quick start guide.

A fallback gateway becomes permanent

If the very first charge fails on your primary gateway and succeeds on a fallback, every future cycle uses that gateway. Check the gateway on the first successful transaction when reviewing the plan. See Pause, resume or stop for managing billing, and the terminology guide for gateway fallback.

For gateways that support Installment Plan and Subscription, see the gateway reference.