ARB - Cancel subscription but finish term

[Liandri]

I want to allow users to cancel the subcription but finish the term, and I'm not sure about the best way to enable this functionality.

Does ARB functionaity allow this already? Does it switch to canceled/terminated immediately or will it wait until the end of the term?

If not, would the best way be to figure out where in the subscription the user is and set the total occurrences to the number that will force it to terminate at the desired time? Given this, I would need to set the total occurrences to be the value of the current interval? For example, if it was the 15th month since the start date of a monthly subscription, I need to set the total occurrences to 15? If someone understands, if would be awesome if you could describe a scenario that would illustrate the correct functionality so I can do it right.

Thanks for your guys' help. I wanted to check here before I went too far and had the wrong idea.

[Elaine]

It is not possible to set a pre-determined cancellation date other than the end date of the currently active subscription. If you cancel a subscription it will cancel the subscription upon successful submission of the cancellation request.

For example, in your scenario you suggest that the customer should only have 15 totalOccurrences. Assuming that the subscription is active and has more than 15 totalOccurrences, you could update the subscription to adjust the number of totalOccurrences to 15 which would cause the subscription to naturally expire after the 15th occurrence.

I hope this information is helpful to you.

Thank you,

Elaine

[Liandri]

K so in doing a real subscription (using account out of test mode w/ $1 subscription amounts), my application successfully changed the total occurrences but to the wrong number due to an error on my part.

The number of payments was 1 with infinite total occurrences.

The applicaton successfully set it to 2 total occurrences when it should have been set to 1 so that no more payments would go through.

I fixed the error that caused this, but in trying to edit the subscription manually in the recurring billing manager and set it to 1, I got an error that the number HAD to be 2 or greater.

My guess is that I would have recieved the same error in my application had I tried to set it to 1. Does this mean, then, that AuthNet will not allow the total occurrences to be set as less than or equal to the number of total payments?

Is there any way they might change it so that you can't set total occurrences to number that are ONLY LESS THAN the total payments?

So if total payments were 1, I could set total occurrences to 1. But not <1.

If total payments were 15, I could set total occurrences to 15. But not <15.

Is there anybody to talk to about this being changed? Or maybe it's just an error in the recurring billing manager?

[Trevor]

Due to the nature of the Automated Recurring Billing system, it does not allow for subscriptions to be created with only one occurance.  A subscription is, by definition, more than one payment.  If you would like to simply store your customer's card information for future payment, than you may be interested in reviewing the Customer Information Manager (CIM).  CIM allows you full control over when to bill each customer while still removing the burdon of storing customer card data.