Subscriptions

From version 2.0.0 in Business24 CRM, there is a new major feature added that will help you to bill your customers in a more faster way based on subscription billing. Subscription payments is provided via Stripe, you will need to have active Stripe account in order to use this feature.

Please note that the subscriptions feature is different from recurring invoices. The recurring invoices are used only to re-create the invoice on a specific date but with subscriptions, if the customer is subscribed to the subscription, he/she will be auto billed via Stripe and the invoice will be created.

Configure Stripe subscriptions

You will need first to configure the Stripe Checkout payment gateway in order to use the Subscriptions feature.

Navigate to Setup->Settings->Payment Gateways->Stripe Checkout and perform the following steps:

  1. Set Stripe Checkout to be Active.
  2. Configure Stripe publishable key and Stripe secret key

Configure Stripe checkout webhook for subscriptions

While you are in Setup->Settings->Payment Gateways->Stripe Checkout, you will need to configure the webhook for Stripe Subscriptions.

Each installation will have unique webhook protection key, you will able to see yours in the Stripe Checkout Webhook Key field

In Stripe Dashboard navigate to Developers->Web hooks and click add a new endpoint.

The webhook URL will be like:

http://your-crm-installation.com/gateways/stripe/webhook/[WEBHOOK_KEY]

Replace [WEBHOOK_KEY] with your actual webhook key.

Business24 CRM will generate a unique key for each installation, you can either use this key or manually add any key in alphanumeric you want, in case you decide to change the webhook key and you already have configured the webhook in Stripe, you will need to update the webhook key in Stripe dashboard too.

Test your webhook

It’s very important to make sure that your webhook is configured properly, otherwise, the subscription feature may not work properly.

Once you configure the webhook via Stripe dashboard, click on the configured webhook URL and click on the top right button Send test webhook then a popup modal will be shown, just click on the bottom right button Send test webhook

Keep in mind that the “Send test webhook” button is only available when you have toggled to view test data, once you test the webhook URL while test data is toggled on, switch off test data and configure the same webhook URL in your live account.

Test Webhook in Stripe

If the webhook is configured properly at the bottom you should see this response:

Stripe test webhook response

Stripe Products

If you haven’t created your products and billing plans, you should create via the Stripe Dashboard, Business24 CRM will fetch the billing plans directly from Stripe and will display them while creating/editing subscription.

There is no option to add billing plans via Business24 CRM admin area, you should always add the billing plans via Stripe Dashboard.

Subscription Statuses

There are 6 subscription statuses in Business24 CRM, 5 are the default Stripe subscription statuses and one additional status is added Future.

You can read the lifecycle for subscriptions and statuses at by clicking here

Future – The additional Business24 CRM status Future means that the customer subscribed but the first billing date is in future, as an example if the customer subscribes on 2018-05-18 and you configured First Billing Date to be 2018-05-25, the subscription is active but the customer will be billed at the future date.

Business24 CRM subscriptions for Stripe do not support trial subscriptions

Create New Subscription

In order to create new subscriptions, from the main menu click Subscriptions then New Subscription.

Billing Plan

Select billing plans for this subscription, the billing plans will be fetched from your Stripe account.

Quantity

Configure quantity if it’s necessary, otherwise leave it to 1

First Billing Date

This is the first billing date field, leave blank to use the date when the customer is subscribed to the subscription. This field must be a future date, if you select a date and the date is passed but customer is not yet subscribed, the date when the customer will subscribe will be used.

Note that Stripe does not support the creation of subscriptions in past dates.

Subscription Name

Add subscription name, shown to the customer too, in most cases this will be your product name.

Description

You can add an additional description for this subscription, also visible to the customer.

Customer

Select customer for this subscription.

Currency

The currency will be auto-selected based on base currency or customer currency, you can’t manually change the  currency.

Always use the same currency in Business24 CRM and Stripe billing plan currency

This means that you can’t have currency EUR and select billing plan configured in Stripe with USD currency.

Tax

You can select tax for the subscription, note that Stripe allows only 1 tax, you can’t select more tax rates here.

Send subscription to the customer

After you configure the subscription successfully, you may want to send the subscription to the customer, note that the subscriptions in Business24 CRM are related to the primary contact of the customer.

To send the subscription to the primary contact you can click on the top left email envelope button, additionally, if you want to view how the subscription will look, click on View Subscription button.

You may want to take a look at Setup->Email Templates, to adjust the subscriptions email templates.

Subscriptions to the customers area

If you want to show or hide subscriptions in customers area, you can navigate to Setup->Settings->Subscriptions and set Show subscriptions in customers area to Yes.

The subscriptions menu item is located under the profile menu dropdown and will be shown only to primary contact and only if the customer has subscriptions created under his account.

Subscribe to subscription

In order customer to subscribe to a subscription, you must send the subscription to the customer primary contact and include the subscription link in the email via the built-in email feature for subscription or send the subscription link manually.

After the customer access the subscription he/she can review the subscription and subscribe by clicking on the subscribe button.

Business24 CRM Subscription Subscribe

Canceling Subscription

To get familiar with canceling the subscription, please read more the official Stripe documentation by clicking here

Canceling from the admin area

If you want to cancel subscription directly from the admin area, you can open the subscription and click on the cancel button, you will be able to see 2 options:

  • Cancel
  • Cancel at the end of the billing period

If you click Cancel, the subscription will be cancelled immediately, if you click Cancel at the end of billing period, the subscription will be cancelled based on the end billing period and also, in this case, you can reactive the subscription, but if you cancel it immediately, there is no option ti reactivate.

Cancelling from customers area.

The primary contact also can cancel the subscription via the customers area, the options are identical like in the admin area.

Credit Card Token

Business24 CRM will store the Stripe customer id in the database for future payments.

Credit card token is token provided by Stripe related to the credit card that subscribed to the subscription, Business24 CRM does not store the credit card number in the database, the credit card token and last 4 digits are fetched directly from Stripe servers via API.

The primary contact can update the credit card anytime he/she want by logging into the customers area and navigating from the top Profile menu -> Credit Card.

Sometimes your customers need to change the card info that they have on record with your business, whether that’s just to swap in a preferred card, or because the card issuer sent a replacement. Stripe takes care of updating expiring cards for you, and also attempts to update saved card details when a customer’s physical card is replaced, but in rare cases, if Stripe is unable to update the card details automatically, the contact must update the credit card manually via the customers area.

Reusing the credit card token

The credit card token for this customer will be used or future subscription too, as example once the customer subscribe to the subscription, in Stripe, Business24 CRM will create customer and this credit card token will be linked to this customer, also the customer id from Stripe will be stored in Business24 CRM database for future payments.

The next time you create a subscription for this customer, the customer won’t need to enter his credit card details again, he/she can just click a button and will be subscribed in no time.

Testing Subscriptions

If you want to test the subscriptions, you need to configure Stripe testing keys and read the following guide: https://stripe.com/docs/testing

In this guide, you can get familiar with how the testing works and also there is listed test credit cards.

Keep in mind that it’s important to note that you must enable test mode in Setup->Settings->Payment Gateways->Stripe Checkout and add test secret and publishable key.

Also, before switching to production mode, while testing, if you subscribed to any test subscription, make sure to mark those subscriptions as Cancelled from Business24 CRM admin area.

Important Notes

  • Do not edit the subscription directly from Stripe dashboard, if you want to perform edit you can do this via Business24 CRM admin dashboard.
  • Business24 CRM subscriptions only work with 1 line item (billing plan/product), do not add multiple subscription products via the Stripe dashboard to avoid unnecessary results.
  • Once the customer is subscribed to the subscription, the subscription can’t be deleted, mark them as canceled instead.