Automatic Billing and the Service Lifecycle

What this article covers

Most of what the platform does to your customers’ money happens while nobody is logged in. Once a night it raises renewal documents, charges saved payment methods, suspends services that were not paid for, terminates services that stayed suspended, and sends the emails that go with each step. This article sets out that sequence in the order it actually happens, so you can plan around it and explain it to a customer.

Every timing described here is configured in one place: Settings → Billing → Automation. See Billing for a field-by-field tour of that page; this article explains what each field does to a live service.

The daily run

All of the billing lifecycle work happens in a single nightly pass at 02:00 UTC. The steps run one after another, in a fixed order, and the whole pass is treated as one job: a second copy will not start while the first is still working.

If the platform was not running at 02:00 — a restart, an upgrade window — the pass is not lost. On the next start, if more than 23 hours have gone by since the last completed run, it runs immediately as a catch-up. A missed night therefore delays billing by hours, not by a day.

Each step is fenced off from the others. If one step hits a problem, the remaining steps still run.

The order of the nightly steps

1. Scheduled cancellations — any service whose cancellation date has arrived is terminated.
2. Renewal documents — invoices or proformas are raised for services approaching (or past) their next due date.
3. Automatic payment — saved payment methods are charged for eligible unpaid documents, first attempts and retries alike.
4. Suspension — services still unpaid past their grace period are suspended.
5. Termination — services suspended for longer than the termination grace are terminated.
6. Invoice reminders — the three chasing emails for documents that are still unpaid.
7. Renewal reminders — the forward-looking “your service renews soon” email.
8. Usage and period billing — bandwidth-based charges and the monthly summary document for hourly services.
9. Month-end close-out — when consolidated monthly invoicing is on, the previous month is closed.

Note: the order matters. Renewal documents are raised before the charge attempt, and suspension runs after it — so a customer with a working saved card is charged and never sees a suspension, all inside the same nightly pass.

Raising the renewal document

How far ahead

The Renewal Invoice field (labelled Before due date) in the Service Lifecycle section decides this. Set it to 7 and a service due on the 20th gets its document on the 13th. Left unset, the platform uses 7 days.

The document is an invoice or a proforma depending on Billing Document Type. In proforma mode the customer receives a proforma, and it becomes a numbered invoice when it is paid. See Proforma Details.

Past-due services are picked up too. If a cycle was somehow never billed, the next nightly pass raises the missing document rather than skipping the service forever.

Which services are billed

A service is billed for its next cycle only when all of the following are true:

• Its status is Active. A service that is Pending, Suspended, Cancelled or Terminated is not sent a renewal document. A suspended service is chased for the bill it already has, not given a new one.
• It has no cancellation request pending. Once a customer or a staff member schedules a cancellation, the service stops being billed.
• It is not billed hourly. Hourly services never receive a renewal document — they draw on the credit balance instead. See Hourly (Usage) Billing.
• It is not marked Billing Exempt. An exempt service keeps running and its due date is rolled forward each cycle, but no invoice, no proforma and no charge attempt is ever produced for it.
• It does not already have a document covering that cycle. A paid or unpaid document for the cycle blocks a second one.

One document at a time, or one per cycle

By default a service carries a single outstanding renewal document. When the next one is raised, any unpaid or on-hold invoices and proformas already on that service are cancelled first, along with any pending upgrade request, so the customer is never looking at two competing bills for the same box.

Switch on Continuous Invoice Generation and the behaviour changes: every cycle gets its own document even when the previous one is unpaid, and nothing is cancelled. Arrears accumulate as separate documents. Choose this if your accounting needs an unbroken document per period; leave it off if you would rather chase one balance.

What ends up on the document

• The service’s recurring price.
• Each active recurring add-on whose own next due date falls within the cycle being billed, priced per unit and multiplied by its quantity. An add-on on a longer cycle than the service is only billed on the cycles it is actually due.
• Any cross-connects on the service that carry a monthly cost, each as its own line.
• A negative discount line if the service carries a recurring discount. The discount is taken off the base price before tax, and it does not consume the discount code’s usage allowance, so it keeps applying cycle after cycle.
• Tax, worked out as described in VAT and Tax on Your Documents.

If automatic credit application is switched on, available credit is applied to the new document straight away and may settle it outright. See Credit Balance.

The customer receives the document by email — Invoice Created or Proforma Invoice Created, depending on your document type.

Charging the saved payment method

Automatic payment runs immediately after renewal documents are raised, and it handles first attempts and retries in the same pass.

The two conditions

A document is only charged when Enable Auto-Payment is on and the customer is enrolled with an active saved payment method. Enrolment happens when a customer stores a payment method and Auto-enroll customers when they save a card is on. With that toggle off, saving a card simply stores it for the customer to pick at checkout; nothing is charged unattended.

When the first attempt happens

Days Before Due (labelled When to attempt charge) holds the charge back until the document is within that many days of its due date. Anything already overdue always qualifies. The field accepts 1 to 14; left unset, the platform uses 3. This is anchored to the due date, not to when the document was created — so raising documents 14 days ahead with a 3-day charge window means the customer has 11 quiet days to pay by hand first.

Retries

Max Retries (0–5, unset behaves as 5) and Retry Interval in hours (1–72, unset behaves as 24) govern what happens after a failure. Because the pass runs once a night, an interval of 24 hours means one attempt per night. Setting a shorter interval does not produce more attempts per night; setting a longer one spreads them further apart. Once the retries are used up the attempt is closed as failed and the document is left to the reminders and the suspension clock.

How a failure is classified

Not all declines are treated alike. The wording the payment provider returns decides which of these applies:

Charge failure handling

Kind of failure	What the platform does
The stored method no longer exists at the provider, or the card has expired	Retries stop at once and the saved method is switched off. The customer is emailed Your saved payment method was disabled.
Insufficient funds, or the issuer declined	Retries continue on the normal schedule. These count towards the method’s failure tally; after three in a row the method is switched off and the customer is emailed.
The bank demands the customer authenticate	Retrying cannot clear this, so it stops. The customer is emailed Action needed to complete your payment and has to pay from the portal.
A configuration or connection problem on your side or the provider’s	The document is retried on the normal schedule, but the failure is never counted against the customer’s card.
Anything the platform cannot classify	Retried on the normal schedule and not counted against the card, on the basis that an unrecognised message is as likely to be a passing fault as a real decline.

When a method is switched off, any customer relying on it for automatic payment is repointed at another of their active saved methods — their default first, otherwise the most recently used. If they have none left, they stay enrolled but nothing is charged until they add one.

Documents that are skipped entirely

• Documents already settled by credit, or with nothing left to pay.
• Services that are exempt from billing, or that are neither active nor suspended.
• Documents on a payment gateway that is switched off, or that cannot charge a stored method unattended. See Payment Gateways.

What each side sees

The customer receives Payment Successful on a good charge and Action Required — Payment Failed on a bad one; the failure email says whether another attempt is coming and how many hours away it is.

You see the attempt history on the document itself, with the decline reason the provider gave. Settings → Billing → Automation also carries a Payment method health panel listing every saved method that is failing or has been switched off, so you can reach out before the next renewal rather than after it.

Chasing an unpaid document

The three reminders

The Invoice Reminders block offers First Reminder, Second Reminder and Third Reminder. Each has its own on/off switch and its own day count, and each count is measured from the day the document was created — the label reads After invoice created, not after the due date.

• A reminder whose switch is off, or whose day box is blank or 0, sends nothing at all.
• Each level sends once per document. Turning a level on later will pick up documents that already qualify.
• Reminders cover unpaid invoices and unpaid proformas alike.
• Which email goes out depends on the date: a document past its due date uses the Invoice Overdue template, one still within its due date uses Invoice Reminder. Both are editable, and can be switched off, under Email Templates.

You can also send a reminder for a single unpaid document by hand from the document itself, without disturbing the numbered sequence.

The renewal reminder

Separately from the chasing emails, active recurring services get a forward-looking Service Renewal Reminder seven days before the next due date — once per cycle, and only for a date still in the future. Hourly services, billing-exempt services and services with a cancellation pending are left out. Edit or switch off the email under Email Templates.

Abandoned checkout recovery

This one is not part of the nightly pass — it is checked every hour, so it lands while the customer still remembers starting the order. With Send recovery emails on, a customer who began a checkout and never finished gets exactly one email. Send after sets the delay in hours, Stop after skips orders older than the given number of hours, and Reached gateway only restricts it to orders where the customer actually reached the payment step.

Suspension

Auto Suspension must be on for any of this to happen. Suspension Grace (labelled After due date) sets how many days past the due date a service may run unpaid.

• 0 means the service is suspended on its due date, in that night’s pass.
• Any higher number counts whole days from the due date.
• Left unset, the platform uses 3 days.

A service is passed over when a paid or on-hold invoice covers the cycle, when a paid proforma covers it, when it is marked Billing Exempt, or when its Do Not Suspend Until date is still in the future. That last field lives on the service record and is the right tool for a customer you have given more time: automatic suspension and termination skip the service until the date passes, while your own manual actions still work. Clear the field to remove the protection.

What the customer experiences

Suspension is a stop, not a wipe:

• A virtual server is shut down gracefully — it is given time to close down cleanly first — and its disks are left alone.
• A game server is stopped after a short grace period; the world data stays on disk and the server keeps its address, so an unsuspend hands the customer back the same server their players saved.
• A service delivered through an integration is handed to that integration to suspend in its own way.

The service shows as Suspended in the client portal with the reason attached — automatic suspensions read Overdue payment — and the customer is emailed Service Suspended. They can still log in, read their invoices and pay.

Getting back

Paying the outstanding document restores the service automatically: the platform unsuspends it as part of processing the payment and the customer is emailed Service Restored. You can also unsuspend by hand from the service page.

Termination

Auto Termination must be on. Termination Grace (labelled After suspension) is counted from the moment the service was suspended, not from the due date.

• 0 means the service is terminated in the first nightly pass after it is suspended.
• Left unset, the platform uses 14 days.
• The Do Not Suspend Until date also holds off termination.

Termination is final. The platform cancels the service’s unpaid invoices and proformas, cancels any outstanding charge attempts, marks the originating order as terminated, then tears down the underlying resources in the background. The customer is emailed Service Terminated. If that was the customer’s last active service, their client record moves to inactive.

Warning: the two grace periods stack. With the shipped values a service is suspended 3 days after its due date and terminated 14 days after that — 17 days from the missed due date to destruction. Work out your own total before changing either number, and use Do Not Suspend Until rather than widening the grace period for everyone when you only mean to protect one customer.

Cancellations the customer asked for

A cancellation request is separate from non-payment. When a customer or a staff member schedules one, the service stops being billed immediately and is terminated on the scheduled date by the first step of the nightly pass. Until that date the service keeps running normally.

Housekeeping the pass also does

• Never-paid orders — a service still awaiting its first payment 30 days after it was created is cancelled, along with its order and any unpaid documents. Any discount or referral voucher the order consumed is handed back so the customer can use it again.
• Billing-exempt services — their due dates are rolled forward each cycle so they read sensibly, without producing documents.
• Due-date repair — if a service’s renewal date is left behind a document that was in fact paid, the pass moves it to the correct next cycle so billing resumes. Where the gap is too large to repair safely the service is flagged for you to look at instead of being fast-forwarded.

What you change, and where

Automation timings and their controls

Timing	Where	What zero or blank means
Renewal Invoice (days before due)	Settings → Billing → Automation → Service Lifecycle	Blank falls back to 7 days.
Suspension Grace (days after due)	Service Lifecycle	0 suspends on the due date. Blank falls back to 3 days.
Termination Grace (days after suspension)	Service Lifecycle	0 terminates at the next nightly pass after suspension. Blank falls back to 14 days.
First / Second / Third Reminder	Service Lifecycle → Invoice Reminders	Switch off, blank or 0 all mean the reminder never sends.
Days Before Due (auto-payment)	Billing Automation	Blank falls back to 3 days. Overdue documents always qualify regardless.
Max Retries	Billing Automation	0 means one attempt and no retry. Blank falls back to 5.
Retry Interval (hours)	Billing Automation	Blank falls back to 24 hours. Values below 24 still yield at most one attempt per night.
Send after / Stop after (checkout recovery)	Service Lifecycle → Abandoned Checkout Recovery	Blank behaves as 4 hours and 168 hours respectively.
Auto Suspension, Auto Termination	Automation	Off means that nightly step never runs. Existing suspensions and terminations are unaffected.
Auto Provisioning	Automation	Off means a paid order is not delivered automatically; you provision it by hand from the order.
Do Not Suspend Until, Billing Exempt	The individual service page	Blank means no protection and normal billing.

Tip: after changing a grace period, read the Example timeline box the Service Lifecycle section draws for you. It restates your three numbers as dates for a service due on 3 March, which is the quickest way to catch a value you did not mean to type.

What you trigger by hand

The nightly pass owns the routine work. These stay under your control:

• Suspend, Unsuspend and Terminate on an individual service. Suspending by hand asks for a reason, and the customer sees the reason you type.
• Recording a payment or marking a document paid, which restores a suspended service the same way an automatic payment would.
• Sending one more reminder for a single unpaid document.
• Generate previous month now for hourly summary documents, and Preview this month / Close previous month now for consolidated invoicing.
• Setting Do Not Suspend Until or Billing Exempt on a service to take it out of the automatic path.

Common questions

A customer paid this morning — will they still be suspended tonight?

No. Suspension only picks up services with no paid document covering the cycle, and a payment moves the service’s due date forward as it is processed.

Why did a suspended service not get a renewal document?

Renewal documents are only raised for active services. A suspended service already owes the bill that suspended it; issuing another one would double-bill the same period.

I switched Auto Suspension off. Do reminders still go out?

Yes. Reminders, renewal documents and automatic payment are independent of the suspension and termination switches. Turning suspension off stops the enforcement, not the chasing.

Can I stop everything for one customer without changing the settings?

Set Do Not Suspend Until on their services to hold off suspension and termination while still billing them, or mark the service Billing Exempt to stop billing it altogether.

Related articles

Billing, Invoices, Proforma Details, Service Details, Hourly (Usage) Billing, VAT and Tax on Your Documents, Credit Balance, Consolidated Monthly Invoicing, Email Templates, Payment Gateways.