Overview

Elastic Path Subscriptions enables you to manage the billing and recurring payments associated with your customers subscriptions. Billing runs generate invoices for your customers. Payment runs automatically process payments against those invoices. See Managing Billing & Payments.

Invoices

Invoices represent the amount a customer owes for a subscription. Elastic Path Subscriptions generates an invoice for every period in a subscription billing cycle. Invoices provide:

• an itemized list of goods and services provided by a subscription.
• the cost of a subscription.
• if applicable, any taxes.

Subscriptions automatically generates an invoice for each billing cycle and initiates payment using billing and payment runs.

Invoice Lifecycle

The invoice lifecycle is described below.

1. When a subscription is created, an invoice for the first billing period is created. When a subscription is created as part of an order, the payment for the order covers the first billing period.
2. Subscription invoices are created by billing runs. The billing run identifies subscriptions that require a new invoice for their next billing period and creates them. At this point, invoices are marked as outstanding.
3. The payment run identifies invoices that are still outstanding and attempts to take payment for them. If the payment succeeds then the invoice is no longer outstanding. If the payment fails for any reason, then the invoice remains outstanding and is picked up by the next payment run to retry the payment.