Suspend subscription

We have a legacy subscription type where the member pays by Bank Standing Order and the subscription is renewed manually via the back end by the Club Treasurer when the payment is received (within the grace period). Following a subscription increase almost a year ago, several members have overlooked the need to increase the value of their Standing Order are so are underpaying. They are very long-standing members, who tend not to be internet users and generally ignore reminder emails as not being relevant to them.

As there are no invoices generated for these renewals we have no way to record the part-payment in CBSubs. The members concerned remain members, but we want to restrict access to certain club benefits (such as our printed magazine) until the outstanding amount is paid. At present we have to mark the renewal as paid, then go and manually unset several flags to initiate access restrictions (then of course do the reverse when the underpayment is made good).

Is there a way to identify such underpayers as having a payment status of 'Renewal Pending' instead of 'Paid'. This then might allow me to set up a conditional action to do the relevant flag settings.

Thank you

CBSubs isn't really designed to deal with partial payments like that. It's meant to be a subscription manager and not an invoice system. Best approach sounds like you just need 2 plans. 1 for those that underpaid and 1 for those that paid the appropriate amount. If they underpaid simply subscribe them to the relevant plan. This should automate all the flags you're having to manually set right now.

Thank you for your prompt reply, and for confirming what I thought would be the case. I'd avoided taking this option as 'upgrading' to another plan changes the Subscription Date, and as a result the Renewal and Expiry Dates which brings its own problems.

But I appreciate your guidance and thank you for your time.

Since all these subscriptions are manually managed it'll be safe to just directly modify the subscriptions. To do this click the # under the Id column within CBSubs > Subscriptions. You can either change the dates after upgrading them into the different plan or just directly change the plan associated with their subscription there.

You maybe able to automate this process with CBSubs SQL Actions though since [replaced_plan_id] should give you the ID of the plan they upgraded from. It's just a strange situation in general to activate a subscription for underpayment. Typically you'd just reject those payments and they'd have to pay the proper amount.

Good idea! I hadn't thought of doing a direct mod to the Plan though I have done this for dates when our Membership Secretary has manually renewed the same subscription twice by mistake. I'll look into it, and thank you. I'll pass on SQL Actions though - my SQL skills are pretty basic!

Yes, I know it's not usual to activate an underpaid subscription, but we do have our reasons!

Users often want to do the impossible and it is certain that system designers cannot think of everything the users might want to do however hard they try

Regards