You can set up your subscription rules to charge orders on a specific day of the week or month. Customers will always be billed immediately at the time of checkout, but subsequent orders will charge on the day you have set. This guide provides an overview of the charge day functionality, how to set specific charge days, creating cut-off windows and updating the charge day.

Before you start

• Checkouts made on the same day as your set charge date will not skip the next interval charge.
• This feature is in Eastern Standard Time (EST). Any orders made by midnight 00:00 ET (UTC -4) of the specific charge day will not skip.

Understand specific charge days

Customers will always be charged when they first sign-up. The second order date will depend on when the checkout was made. 

If the checkout was made on the same day as your set charge date, it will not skip the next interval charge. The processing time for checkout orders is in Eastern Standard Time (EST). Any orders made by midnight 00:00 ET (UTC -4) of the specific charge day will not skip. 

If the checkout was made on a different day than your set charge date, the second order will always skip the next billing cycle to prevent customers from being double-charged.

If you would like to turn off the skip cycle feature, reach out to the Recharge support team. Note that even when turning off this feature, the Recharge billing system will not bill a customer twice in a single billing period. If you would like to do this, you can set up a cut-off window.

The table below highlights different schedules depending on when the customer placed their checkout order.

Charging on a specific day of the week or month will also impact prepaid subscription’s shipment and charge dates.

The table below highlights different schedules depending on when the customer placed their prepaid checkout order. In this example the customer placed a 3 month prepaid subscription.

Set a specific charge day in a subscription  

1. In the merchant portal, click Products and select Products. 
2. Select the product you would like to edit.
3. If you’re using “Product Subscription Plans,” click the pencil icon next to the plan, adjust the charge frequency under Plan details, and set the week's or month's charge day under Advanced settings.
4. For all other setups, under Charge customer on this day of the month, set the specific charge day of the week or month.
5. Click Save or Update.

Use a cut-off window

When an order is placed at checkout, it is considered to be part of the upcoming specified order date. For example, if a customer places an order on October 10th and you bill your recurring customers on the 15th, the October 10th order would be fulfilled alongside the orders that process on October 15th.

Depending on your specified charge day, you may find customers are waiting a while for their next order. You may also want to fulfill an order for a customer, even though your specified charge day for that week or month has passed.

In this scenario, you will want to create a cut-off window. This creates a window of time where a customer can place an order and have it fulfilled within that billing cycle. See Creating a cut-off window.

Update specific charge day for individual existing customers

1. In the merchant portal, select Customers and click Customers.
2. Search for and select the customer.
3. Select the subscription product and click Edit frequency in the Actions menu.
4. Adjust the Charge day of the month/week and click Save. This will also auto-update the upcoming charge date to reflect this change.

Change day of the month or week in bulk

You can use the Bulk management tools to update the specific day of week or month a customer will be charged on for their subscription.  To process this type of update you will need to complete the Importing Subscriptions CSV template with the following columns:

• subscription_id
• Either order_day_of_month or order_day_of_week

Make changes to the numbers under the column order_day_of_month. Change the day under the column for order_day_of_week.

• If filling out the day of the month, use numerals (for example, 4 to indicate the 4th day of the month).
• If filling out the day of the week, use the following integers to represent day of the week. (for example, Tuesday = 1).

• 0  = Monday
• 1  = Tuesday
• 2 = Wednesday
• 3 = Thursday
• 4 = Friday
• 5 = Saturday
• 6 = Sunday

The order_day_of_month column lists the day of the month customers are charged. This column is only valid if order_interval_unit is month. The order_day_of_week column lists the day of the week customers are charged. This column is only valid if order_interval_unit is week. Confirm under order_interval_unit column to determine whether week or month is in use. If you require other updates, be sure to add these additional columns.

To make an update using the import tool: 

1. Use the Export Builder to pull the Subscriptions - All or Subscriptions - Active export. 
2. Copy and paste the required fields noted above from the Subscriptions export into the template file. All other columns in the template can be removed.
3. Once your CSV file is ready to import, follow steps 2 and 3 in the Bulk managing subscriptions guide to complete the update.
4. To ensure this update does not skip a charge, you must also complete a bulk charge date update. See Bulk managing charges for steps to complete this bulk update.