As the name implies, anniversary billing mode involves billing customers on the anniversary of the day they signed up for the subscription. Broadly speaking, this has two major results:
In addition to the above, it is important to consider scalability. Because anniversary mode results in a monthly billing workload divided between 28-31 days, you are much less likely to have problems with race conditions and other server-based limitations as your company grows. If you intend to have more than 20 customers, we recommend that you choose anniversary billing mode.
Knowing what to expect from your billing system can help alleviate a lot of potential concern and confusion. Here we will walk through the life of a hypothetical customer, focusing specifically on how they will be billed.
Say you have a customer, Alice. Alice would like to order hosting and purchase a domain name from you. She finds your plan listings on the web, and goes through your order process. This process will create a customer record in your Business Manager for Alice, and add two subscriptions to this account. Let's assume that Alice chose to pay for her hosting on a monthly billing cycle, and her domain on a yearly billing cycle and that she chose a plan called Personal Hosting. We will also assume that you have Business Manager set to generate invoices ten days before the subscription is set to renew.
As part of the order process, the first invoice for Alice's subscriptions will be created. No matter how she chooses to pay, the system will automatically enter the date that each of these subscriptions renews. Say she signs up on June 15th, 2008. Her hosting subscription, which is on a monthly billing cycle, will renew again on July 15th, 2008. Her domain, which is on a yearly cycle, will renew June 15th, 2009. Because she subscribed on the 15th of the month, these subscriptions will always renew on the 15th.
Now let's say that Alice has decided to open a small business, and she wants a separate hosting account for this business' website. She goes through your order process again, this time on the 20th of August. She buys your Business Hosting subscription. An invoice is automatically generated through the order process for this first month of hosting. Alice would already have paid for her Personal Hosting on August 15th.
In September, Alice will get two invoices. She will get an invoice for her Personal Hosting that will renew on September 15th, and a second invoice for her Business Hosting, which will renew on September 20th. Now let's fast forward to May 2009.
By default, Business Manager is set to generate domain renewal invoices 30 days in advance, rather than the 5-10 days that other subscription invoices are usually set to be generated. This is to prevent people from losing their domains. Thirty days provides enough warning that a customer should have time to pay their bill on time, and allow the renewal to take place. Because of this, Alice will receive three invoices. On May 5th, Alice will get an invoice for her Personal Hosting subscription, which renews ten days later, on May 15th. On May 10th, she will get an invoice for her Business Hosting subscription, which renews May 20th. On May 15th, Alice will get an invoice for her domain subscription, which renews June 15th.
This may sound like a lot of invoices. Keep in mind that if Alice is paying with a credit card that she keeps on file, or with PayPal subscriptions (the two most common payment methods), these payments will be made and logged by Business Manager without either you or Alice having to do any work. If Alice pays manually, she can write a single check for all three invoices and mail one payment. You can use the Quick Manual Payment feature to mark each of her invoices as paid.
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