Subscription lifecycle, payments and refunds

The screens that change what a customer is charged. Each one is reached from a subscription or a payment profile rather than from a menu, and several cannot be undone.

These screens move real money

Everything on this page has a financial consequence outside MSPControl — a card is charged, a refund is issued, a balance is altered, or a service stops. Unlike most of the panel, there is usually no equivalent of “change it back”.

Read what each action does at the moment of confirmation before clicking it.

Cancelling a subscription

1. Open the subscription and choose Cancel Subscription. The screen shows Next Billing At read-only, and a cancellation note if one is configured in the Subscriptions Policy.

2. Choose when it ends. End of period is always offered. Immediately appears only if the Subscriptions Policy allows immediate cancellation — if you cannot see it, that is policy, not a missing permission.

3. Next opens Cancel Subscription Summary, listing the Plan and its Addons so you can see everything the cancellation takes with it.

4. Confirm.

The summary step exists because add-ons go too

Cancelling a plan cancels the add-ons attached to it, and the summary screen is the only place that is shown before it happens.

Read that list. A customer who kept an add-on they still needed will notice, and by then the cancellation has run.

Reactivating

Reactivate Subscription brings back a cancelled subscription. The screen shows Cancelled At, the next billing date, Price, quantity, any Surcharge, and the payment profile to charge.

Reactivation can charge immediately

The screen states an immediate charge amount. Reactivating is not simply un-cancelling — it can take money straight away, and a surcharge may apply on top of the normal price.

Check the amount shown before confirming, and tell the customer what will be charged rather than describing it as restoring what they had.

Adjusting the balance

Adjust Subscription Balance applies a manual correction. It shows the Current Balance, then takes:

Field	Meaning
Adjustment Type	Debit or Credit
Amount	How much
Comment	Why
Attachments	Supporting files

Debit and Credit go in opposite directions

This is the one field on the screen where picking the wrong value produces a plausible-looking result that is exactly backwards — a credit where you meant a debit still saves, still shows a new balance, and looks correct until someone reconciles it.

Confirm the direction against the current balance shown at the top of the screen before saving. Always write the comment; it is the only record of intent, and attachments are what make the adjustment defensible later.

Refunds

Process Refund takes a payment profile, an amount and a comment. The refund goes back to the profile you select.

Partial refunds are possible — the amount is yours to set — so check it against the original transaction rather than assuming the field is pre-filled correctly.

Taking and recording payments

Three screens that are easy to confuse, and mixing them up puts the books wrong:

Screen	What it does
Make a Payment / Payment	Takes money through the payment profile
Offline Payment	Records money already received elsewhere — a cheque, a bank transfer
Adjustment	Alters the balance without money moving at all

Offline Payment does not collect anything

It records that payment arrived by another route. If you use it for a payment that was never actually received, the customer’s balance says they have paid and nothing will chase them.

The reverse mistake is worse: using Make a Payment for money already banked charges the customer twice.

Purchasing

Shopping Cart and Purchase Summary carry the buying flow, with Subscription Add-ons for adding to an existing subscription and Add-on Added to Subscription confirming it. See Marketplace and subscriptions for the catalogue side.

Transactions

Transactions lists what has happened on a subscription; EC Transaction opens a single one. This is the record to check before issuing a refund or an adjustment — it shows what was actually charged, as opposed to what the subscription says it should be.

What the customer is told

Every action here has a mail template: Payment Success, Payment Failed, Failed Charges, Credit Limit Exceeded, Subscriptions Suspended, Space /Add-on Suspended, New Subscription, Subscription Cancelled, Subscription Term Changed, Invoices and Account Statement.

Suspension notices are the customer's only warning

Subscriptions Suspended and Space /Add-on Suspended are what a customer receives when their service stops for non-payment. Disabled or misaddressed, the first they know is the outage — and the support call that follows is about a surprise, not about a bill.

Related

• Subscriptions
• Marketplace and subscriptions
• Subscriptions and billing policy
• Ecommerce mail templates