Recurring payments¶
A recurring payment charges a saved payment method — or, if you would rather not hold one, a fresh payment link every cycle — on a schedule you define. ChargeOn runs the charges in the background and records every one, whether it succeeds, fails, or is still waiting on you.
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Set up a recurring payment | Choosing a basis and frequency, and confirming the schedule |
| Pause, resume or stop | Interrupting temporarily, or ending it for good |
| Review history | Every charge a plan produced, including failures |
The four ways a plan can stop¶
Every recurring plan runs on one of four bases. Three of them are Installment plans, which always have a defined end; the fourth, Subscription, is open-ended by default.
| Basis | On screen | How it ends |
|---|---|---|
| Count | N payments | After a fixed number of charges |
| Final amount | Total reached | Once a total has been collected, with any remainder in the last charge |
| End date | End date | On a calendar date you set, with the total spread evenly until then |
| Subscription | Subscription | It does not, by default — a fixed amount is charged every cycle until you stop it, or until an end date you optionally set |
Six frequencies are available: weekly, fortnightly (labelled Biweekly on screen), monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and yearly.
Before you set 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 when you set the plan up — no card or bank details are collected up front, and the plan waits for the customer to pay each link.
A recurring payment cannot collect card details itself — there is nobody at the keyboard when it runs.
Nothing charges until the background jobs are scheduled
Installing ChargeOn does not start recurring billing. An administrator has to schedule the background jobs first — see Part 7 of the quick start guide. A recurring plan created before this is done looks completely correct and simply never charges anyone. This is the single most common reason a recurring plan "does nothing".
A fallback gateway becomes permanent
If the very first charge on a new plan fails on your primary gateway and succeeds on a fallback, every future cycle bills that fallback gateway from then on — not the one you originally configured. There is no automatic failing back. See Pause, resume or stop if this catches you out, and the terminology guide for how gateway fallback works in general.
For which gateways support Installment and Subscription billing, see the gateway reference.