Pausing memberships

There may be times when you need to pause a customer's membership. This stops further charges but allows the customer to come back at a later date and continue where they left off.

How to pause a membership

To pause a membership head to the Customer page and click the Purchases tab. Find the membership you'd like to pause and click details next to it.

Choosing the pause option and you'll be presented with some options for the pause:

Pause date - whether the pause is immediate or scheduled for a future date
Resume date - whether the reactivation is done on a specific date or at some point in the future you don't know when (common for example if somebody is pausing due to redundancy)
If the membership is a recurring one, rather than a fixed length one, then the pause may create a credit note or it may pro-rate the next payment (depending on how the dates fall). Details are shown in the bottom section of the dialog so you know what will happen.

Pro-rating and credit notes

If the pause date is after the next charge then the next charge is simply pro-rated up to the pause date. For example:

Customer pays £100 on April 1st for a months membership
Customer ask gym to pause them on May 15th
Customer is billed £50 on May 1st to cover the period 1st-15th

If the pause date is before the next charge then a credit note amount will be suggested. This is to cover the time left on the last payment that's not been used yet. For example:

Customer pays £100 on April 1st for a months membership
Customer asks gym to pause them on the 15th of April
A credit note of £50 will be recommended as half the months membership (16th-30th) hasn't been used

It should be stressed the credit note amount is optional and you can change it to whatever amount works with your pause policy.

The credit note is used when the customer resumes their membership. As such the customer has in effect paid for a full month upfront which is evened out when they resume their membership.

Charging a membership pause fee

Some gyms charge for pausing a membership. There are a few options depending on how the fee should be charged:

Lower the credit note amount by the fee. With the above example the credit note ends up as £50 so deduct your pause fee (say £20) and enter the result (£30) into the credit note field. This leaves the customer with less credit notes so when they resume their membership they have in effect paid the £20 fee.
Leave the credit note amount as is and charge the customer a manual charge using that option from their customer page. Unlike option 1 this causes the customer to pay the fee immediately rather than have it deducted from their account. This can be a good thing if they decide to not come back as planned and you have a notice period on your memberships, but equally it can be over the top if they do come back.
If you charge a recurring fee (eg a monthly pause fee) then you should create a membership for that instead and when somebody pauses add that membership to their account. Do not forget to remove it when they resume their original membership!

Resuming from a pause

If you entered a scheduled date when you paused the membership, resuming will be automatic and you have no action to take. You can check if you scheduled a resume by clicking details next to the membership on the customer page.

If not then you'll need to manually action the resume. Head to the customer page, click details next to the membership and click the reactivate button to resume the membership:

What happens next depends on the membership type:

Fixed length memberships

A fixed length membership picks up where it left off so there's no extra charges or credit notes. Any dates are simply adjusted to reflect the time the membership was paused.

Recurring memberships

Recurring memberships generate a popup that informs you of the cost of reactivating the membership. The cost is the amount from the reactivate day to the next scheduled charge (for example reactivating on the 15th for a membership on the 1st will be about half the monthly cost).

The customer may have credit notes left over from their pause in which case they will be used up. Following our earlier example where a customer paused on April 15th and had a £50 credit note created as a result:

Customer reactivates on 10th May - the membership charge for May would be £66.66 pro-rated and they have a £50 credit note, so this would result in a charge of £16.66
Customer reactivates on 20th May - the membership charge to the end of the month would be £33.33 pro-rated and they have a £50 credit note, so there would be no charge to reactivate. The customer would then have £16.67 of credit notes left which would be taken off their June 1st payment