How Recurring Billing works
One subscription per Client, whatever the cycles. Quantities track the live count from your Vendor Systems, and changes take effect next cycle rather than prorating.
Before you start
A Client’s Recurring Billing is one Stripe subscription. Each line binds a Service’s recurring price to something countable — devices, users, licenses — and the quantity on that line tracks the live count.
One Client, one Recurring Billing, whatever the cycles. Adobe billed annually alongside everything else billed monthly is one subscription with items on different intervals. It is not two subscriptions, and you do not need a second Recurring Billing to hold the annual side.
An annual line bills a commitment, not a count. Nothing but a decision changes it — a seat added in March does not quietly enlarge a yearly license you already committed to.
Quantity changes do not prorate
A changed quantity takes effect at the next cycle, never mid-period. That is worth knowing, because most people assume usage billing prorates.
Per-seat prices bill in advance and the count is swept continuously, so each period opens billing the right number. What is left is mid-period movement, and it is two-sided: a device added on day fifteen is served unbilled for half a month, and a device removed on day fifteen was already billed in advance for the whole one. Adds and removes largely cancel.
The alternative — proration on every count change — turns a clean monthly invoice into a page of fractional adjustments a Client has to audit.
Steps
- Open Sales › Recurring and choose the Client.
- Add a line: pick the Service, then what it counts.
- To have the count maintained automatically, bind the line to a Vendor Link. See Link a Client to Addigy or Pax8.
- Set the day of the cycle and the days until due.
- Save. Stripe issues each Invoice on the cycle, and the books record it.
Good to know
A count that collapses is not pushed. A quantity of zero, or a drop of more than half the last good figure, is refused and the previous quantity holds — a renamed vendor policy returns cleanly and would otherwise bill a Client nothing for a whole cycle, with no proration to fix it afterwards.
An Invoice raised from Recurring Billing behaves like any other once issued: Payments allocate to it, it ages on the A/R report, and it can be voided or written off.