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Off-Session Charging

Owned by Peter Hickson, created
Last updated: Sept 29, 2023 by Matthew Shovelton
4 min read

Off-Session Charging allows you to charge members’ saved Stripe cards or GoCardless account details directly. This can make some processes easier as it does not require you to add a Purchase to a member’s basket and then wait for them to sign in and make the payment.

The off-session charging page will only deal with subscriptions that are in the “Offered' or “Accepted” state and have not expired. Furthermore, the payment status must be “Awaiting First Payment” or “Payment Overdue”.

If you are charging through Stripe, only single payments are supported. If you are charging through GoCardless, you can choose between a single payment, an existing Payment Plan, or a custom Payment Plan.

If a member has multiple Payment Methods saved, such as more than one debit card saved for Stripe, their default card will be used when processing their Purchases through Off-Session Charging.

If there are multiple Purchases for different members within a Family Group, the Purchases will be grouped under the Lead Family Member, whose payment method will be charged. If you don’t want this to happen, you will need to either temporarily remove the member from the Family Group while you process their payment separately, or use a Member List to restrict the members shown so that the Lead Family Member is not included in the Off-Session Charging list. Learn more about Family Groups in this guide: Family Group Administration.

As an example, off-session charging can be used at renewal time to charge members for their next-year memberships, using their existing direct debit mandates, without the members having to do anything.

If you're going to use Off-Session Charging, you need to make sure that you inform your members properly that you will be charging their saved Payment Methods directly. If you plan to use Off-Session Charging for your Subscription renewals, you can adjust the Auto-generated Emails that are sent out around renewal time informing members that you intend to charge them automatically.

Instructions

  1. Navigate to Admin > Finance > Off-Session Charging.

  2. Filters: Set the filters to find the members and unpaid purchases you are looking for:

    1. Restrict to Member List: Optionally choose a Member List to filter the members shown. Note: If a Member List is selected, even if someone is in the Member List they will not be included if they do not have a relevant saved Payment Method.

    2. Included Product Categories: Choose to include all or only a selection of purchases with certain Product Categories. Learn more about Product Categories in this guide: Product Categories.

    3. Payment Method: Select a Stripe or GoCardless payment method. Learn more about Payment Methods in this guide: Payment Methods, Plans, and Schemes.

    4. If you select a GoCardless payment method, you will have the following options:

      1. Charge some purchases with single payment: If set to yes, you can select Product Categories that will be charged as a single payment, instead of using the selected Payment Plan.

      2. Payment Plan: Select “Single Payment”, an existing Payment Plan, or create a custom plan to use to process the payments. Learn more about Payment Plans in this guide: Payment Methods, Plans, and Schemes.

      3. Anchor to Subscription Start Dates: If this is set, then the anchor date will be set to the earliest start date of the subscriptions in each charge group. If a charge group doesn't have a start date, the anchor date below will be used. If this option is not set, the anchor date below is used for all charges.

      4. Anchor Date: This controls the dates on which payments will be taken. Set this to the date that the first instalment would normally be due. If this date is in the past, the first payment will be taken now, with any subsequent instalments starting one period after the Anchor Date. The Anchor Date will default to today's date.

  3. Refresh: Once happy with your filter criteria, click Refresh to show all Purchases that meet the requirements.

  4. Selection: Check the boxes in the first column to select or deselect the member and their Purchases. All members on the page will be checked by default.

  5. Purchases: Only purchases that are eligible to be paid by the selected Payment Method will be shown in the table. Check the boxes next to the Purchases that you want to be included for each member. All Purchases will be checked by default.

  6. Process: Click “Process” next to an individual member to process all of the selected Purchases against the member’s Payment Method.

  7. Accept Subscription Offers: When you click this button, any Subscription within the selected Purchases that have not been accepted will be marked as accepted.

  8. Apply Discounts: Click to apply any appropriate discounts to the selected Purchases. If you have any active discounts, it is always a good idea to click this just in case. Learn more about discounts in this guide: Discounts.

  9. Process All Selected: Click to process all selected Purchases through their individual Payment Methods in bulk. If any of the selected Purchases are Subscriptions that have not been accepted by the member, the system will accept them before processing the payment.

  10. Result: Once a payment has been processed, the Result column will be populated with a link to the Order and the payment reference.