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Pausing Memberships and Reflecting the Pause in Occupancy Reports

Pausing Memberships and Reflecting the Pause in Occupancy Reports

This guide shows you how to pause a membership and reflect the change in Occupancy Reports
Stuart Stapley avatar
Written by Stuart Stapley. Updated over a week ago

1. Introduction

This guide is for you if you need to pause a customer's membership and you want to ensure that the change is reflected in your Occupancy Reports. If you do not want to show paused memberships, please see Pausing Memberships without Reflecting the Pause in Occupancy Reports

This guide applies to both new and existing Licences.

The procedure below is not recommended for your usual activity; but rather as a temporary solution for special situations. 

Please also keep in mind that the steps below may involve editing active Licences and staff will need to have the security access to do so. Administrators can enable the 'Can Edit Activated Licences' permission from the User record, for any staff member who should be able to make changes to active agreements. 

These steps involve editing your Licences and zero-ing out product prices for the months during which you want to pause the membership. This will prevent the customer from being charged, since, even though issued, their invoices will be 0.

Please note that the 'Discount' field on Licence items will not display if List Price Discounts are not enabled. This will not affect your ability to go through these steps.

2. Adjusting Licence Prices

If you need assistance creating Licences for new customers, please see our dedicated Knowledgebase section for details. 

You can add free months anytime during the billing schedule. However, please keep in mind that this restricts you to pausing memberships according to the billing dates. If you need to pause in-between, please follow the steps described here.

To adjust the prices of your Licence Items:

  1. Create or edit the Licence in question. 

  2. Add or Edit an Office, Virtual Service or Contract Service, depending on what you want to pause.

  3. Edit the Office/Service record as follows: 

  • Enter '0' in the Monthly Price field corresponding to the first month you want to pause. You will notice that the price will become 0 for the subsequent schedule. 

  • Leave the '0' price for as many months as you need and enter the product's price starting with the month when you want to start charging again. The price updates automatically starting with the month you entered it for until the end of the schedule. This happens every time you update the price, from the edited month until the end.

Starting with the month after the billing pause, there are two main option:

  • Not to charge the customer for the free months at all, in which case you will enter the product's list price in the remaining monthly price fields. 

  • To charge for the free months, on top of the current month's fee; either by doubling the monthly price for the same amount of months or by breaking the price down into more installments. The normal billing schedule (regular price) will resume once the paused months and those with extra charges are over. For instance, considering an office that costs £1,000/month; If from March to June you are discounting to 0 and recovering the revenue from July to September in equal £1,000 installments. the normal pricing schedule resumes starting October. 

  • You can break down the payments into more charges: Here we are charging the £300 owed by the customer in 5x£600 installments, instead of 3x£1000.

  • You can also do the opposite and use fewer extra charges of higher amounts. 

  • You do not need to apply the extra charges consecutively. They can just as easily be added to any month(s) that you and your customer agree on.

3. Implications for Licence Approvals

Applying this discount procedure could trigger more approval requests than usual. Your organization may need to adjust relevant policies to make this process run smoother. Requests could occur both for new Licences and for existing ones which are being edited and discounted. Otherwise, the approval process works as expected. 

4. Reporting and Exports

This proces keeps both reporting and exports accurate. Price adjustments reflect into Occupancy Reports. If the monthly price of an office is 0 in a certain month, then the reports will show this. 

For the months when you are applying extra charges, these will reflect into the Reports as well. 

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