Recurring billing¶
Recurring invoices are produced by a scheduled action, not by hand. It walks the active subscription lines, works out which periods are due, and creates one customer invoice per contract.
The billing scheduled action¶
The Subscription: Generate Recurring Invoices scheduled action runs once a day. It is delivered inactive: activate it in once the configuration has been checked on the database.
For each active line it:
skips the line if its contract is not Active, or if the contract is still In Trial;
computes the next period from the line’s Period, Invoice Method and Invoice Basis;
stops when Contract End is reached, or when Auto-renew is off and the first period has been billed;
skips periods that ended before Billing Resumes On, so a paused subscription is not billed retroactively;
adds an invoice line carrying the billed period, and applies the contract’s Coupon, if any.
Lines of the same contract are billed onto one invoice.
Important
One run catches up at most 24 missed periods per line. This is a guard: a mis-set Start Date would otherwise generate years of history in a single run.
Draft or posted¶
The contract’s Invoice Posting policy decides what happens to the generated invoice:
Leave as draft for review (default): the invoice stays in draft, for an accountant to check and post.
Post automatically: the invoice is posted immediately, and — if the contract has a Payment Token — an automatic charge is attempted.
Paid Until only moves forward on posted invoices, so a draft invoice never makes the line look billed.
The generated invoice¶
The invoice is an ordinary customer invoice in the contract’s Billing Journal. It is
flagged as a subscription invoice and links back to the subscription lines it bills; each invoice
line stores the Period Start and Period End it covers. The line label comes
from the line’s Invoice Note when one is set, with #START#, #END# and #PERIOD#
replaced by the billed period.
- menu
- Accounting ‣ Customers ‣ Invoices ‣ (a subscription invoice)
- shows
- A generated recurring invoice with two invoice lines, each showing the billed period in its label, and the link back to the subscription contract.
- highlight
- The billed period in the line labels (red frame).
- data
- Invoice of contract SUB/2026/0012 covering March 2026.
- module
- subscription
- notes
- English UI, light theme, 1440px width, crop to the invoice lines.
Changing a running subscription¶
Changes to a running line are recorded in its Change History tab with the old and the new value, so the reason for a changed invoice amount can always be traced. Changes take effect from the next period that is billed; already posted invoices are not modified.