How to create recurring charges for customers paying via Stripe
Recurring Charges is a billing feature that you can use to charge your customers a fixed amount regularly via Stripe. Unlike a Payment Plan, recurring charges do not need an end date or an invoice generated first, they start from the date you select and work till the moment you disable this option.
Step 1. Add payment cards
Make sure that your Debit/Credit card payment method is activated and your Stripe account is connected to Class Manager because recurring charges can only be done via Stripe at the moment. Since it's automatic payment, the customers who wish to use this option need to save their payment card information on Class Manager. You will not be able to activate recurring charges for customers who do not have payment cards.
Go to Customers > View All, select all customers (or just the customers who wish to use recurring charges), click on Group Actions and select 'Request Payment method':
This will trigger an automatic email that will be sent to customers asking them to add their payment card on the portal. The default email template looks like this:
When customers click on 'Add Payment Card' they will be redirected to the portal where they can enter their card details. Once that is done, they are ready to use recurring charges.
Step 2. Configure Recurring Charges
Go to Billing > Recurring Charges > Settings to select the default configuration option:
Generate Recurring Charges and Invoices option is used if you wish an invoice generated automatically for each payment. This invoice will have the status "Paid" and the amount equal to the amount of the automatic payment.
This is technically a 'pay as you go' kind of configuration, like a gym membership. Each automatic payment generates an invoice on Class Manager. So, a customer's account balance always stays zero, unless you create orders for this customer and generate additional invoices that need to be paid separately.
Generate Recurring Charges only option is used to create automatic payments without generating invoices. These payments will be showing as a credit on customer's account balance and will have to be assigned to manually generated invoices.
This kind of configuration works well if your classes are set to be paid termly, or if you have some customers who wish to overpay each month to budget for future fees such as costume or exam fees.
In case you have customers who do not wish to use recurring charges at all, you may keep recurring charges disabled for them and let them pay their termly invoice in full, whereas customers with recurring charges enabled will have their payments accumulated as a credit and assigned to the term invoice once it has been generated for the season.
Step 3. Select Customers
Go to Billing > Recurring Charges > Overview and click 'Create Recurring Charges':
You will see the list of your customers on the page. Select the customer(s) for whom recurring charges need to be enabled and click 'Create Recurring Charges' again.
Set the start date (the date of the first payment), the payment frequency and the fixed amount that will be charged.
Note! The difference between the 'monthly' occurence type and the 'every 4 weeks' one is that with 'monthly', customers will be charged on a specific date of each month, and with 'every 4 weeks', they will be charged every 28 days which means the payment date will be shifting.
Click 'Create recurring charges' to save the settings and you will be redirected back to the Overview page where you can see the list of customers for whom recurring charges have been created:
You can click on a customer to view the details of their recurring charge configuration. There is no possibility to edit recurring charges but you have the option to Cancel it if necessary:
You can also see the payment history on this page with the status of each payment.