Subscription Overview
Subscription Workflow
If your subscription has a trial period, billing will begin at the end of that trial period. If your subscription does not have a trial period, you can opt to start billing immediately, on a specific date, or a specific day of the month in the future. If you select a day in the future the subscription will be in “Pending” status. Subscriptions that bill immediately or are in a Trial period have a status of “Active”.
If your subscription is set up to bill immediately and the transaction fails the subscription will not be created. If your subscription is “Active” and in a Trial Period or in “Pending” status and fails to successfully bill on the first billing date the status of the subscription will go to “Past Due”
When we bill subscriptions, they are submitted for settlement immediately.
Statuses
Pending
Pending subscriptions are subscriptions that have not started yet. For example, if you create a subscription with an explicit first bill date or a specific billing day of month that is in the future, the subscription will start out in pending status.
Active
Active subscriptions will be charged on the next billing date. You can get the dates from the subscription details. Subscriptions in a trial period are in active status.
Past Due
If a payment for a subscription fails, the subscription status will change to past due. Braintree will automatically retry the transaction 10 days after the inital failure and again 10 days later. You can also manually retry the charge when you want. The subscription will go back to active if a transaction is successful and has not passed its last billing date. If the transaction is not successful the past due subscription will continue to have it’s balance increased every billing cycle indefinitely or until their specified number of billing cycles is reached. We will also try to create a transaction for the balance every billing period when the balance is updated. If it has passed its last billing date the status will be updated to expired. Otherwise, it will stay past due until canceled.
Expired
Subscriptions change to expired status when they have reached the total number of billing cycles if provided.
Canceled
If you cancel the subscription, the status will become canceled and no more billing will occur.
Email Notifications
The gateway can send emails to customers based on recurring billing events. You’ll need to set up your DNS record to allow the gateway to send email from your domain, and then contact Braintree to enable this feature. More information on recurring billing emails is available in the video guide entitled “Recurring Billing Email Notifications.”