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How to charge or accept upfront/advance payments from members
How to charge or accept upfront/advance payments from members

How to handle a member paying early or in advance for their upcoming recurring membership fee.

DeShawn Brown avatar
Written by DeShawn Brown
Updated over 11 months ago

Sometimes a member may decide to pay you upfront or in advance for a future invoice. You may want to charge them early or force their recurring invoice to go out before it's normal schedule. This article explains how to handle that.

Scenario: Let's say for example a member is being billed monthly on the 1st. On the 15th, the member decides they want to go ahead and prepay for the upcoming month's invoice. Since the invoice is not automatically generated until the 1st, here's how you can handle that scenario:
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Step one: Create a One-Off Invoice

First, go ahead and create a one-off invoice for the customer. You can use one-off invoices to generate an invoice for any customer, at any time, for any reason. Simply go to the invoices tab and select "New Invoice."

Step two: Pause Membership.

Next, we need to make sure that the member is not double-charged. Since they've now paid you in advance, we need to let the system know not to bill them for their next month's invoice. You can do this by using the "pause membership" feature.
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Navigate to the team's profile and select the "Membership" tab. From there select "Pause Membership" from the "Membership Actions" dropdown.

In our scenario above, we only want to skip the next month's bill and then resume as normal, so we can select the "Until next bill cycle" option, which will skip the next invoice and resume regular billing after that.

You'll have an option to decide how long to pause their membership for, which will stop invoices from being sent/charged to your customer. In general, just make sure to pause until after the date you'd like to prevent them from being charged and before the date you want them to start paying again.

Now you've successfully collected their money while ensuring they wont be double-charged, but will resume being billed at the right period.

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Happy Coworking!

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