Customers sometimes need a break from their payment plans or subscriptions for a variety of reasons. If they ask for a temporary or indefinite pause on their current payment plan or subscription, you can do this but in a limited way – and not directly via your Paythen account. At the moment, Paythen has limited support for pausing, skipping or postponing scheduled payments. You can do this directly in your Stripe account though.
Here are the steps to pausing a customer's Paythen payment plan or subscription:
Log in to your Stripe dashboard.
Search for the customer via their name or email.
Under the overview tab, on the customer page, find the active subscription, click on the more icon and choose "Pause payment collection".
Now you can choose between "Indefinite" – if you want to pause the plan until an undecided or unknown date in the future, or "Until a custom date" if you just want to skip one or two payments and then automatically resume.
If you choose "Until a custom date", you can select the date in the future you want payments to resume – we recommend making this at least 3 days before the next scheduled payment you want to resume so Stripe generates an invoice in time for that payment. Eg: If you wanted a plan to resume on 23 July 2023, you would choose 20 July 2023 as the custom date to resume payments.
Choose the Invoice behaviour applicable to you. If you intend to collect all payments at some point, we recommend the first option: Keep invoices as drafts as this gives you the most flexibility with relation to the data shown in Paythen and being able to charge the customer for the missed / skipped payments at a future date. If you're not going to be charging these payments, you can choose either of the other two options.
Click the Pause button to confirm the changes, and you're done!
Now your customer's plan is paused – no action is required from within Paythen. Please note that at the moment, support for this feature is limited (we're working on improving this) so no data will update in Paythen for the customer summary page or in any plan reports.
When the customer's plan resumes, the data in your Paythen account will update automatically to reflect this. If you notice any issues or need assistance, please reach out to us.