How can my customers purchase a subscription or membership in advance?
If you want to take subscription/membership sign-ups ahead of a new period, you can set your own membership transition dates
On any subscription or membership product, you can set how many days before the date of billing that you'd like people to be able to purchase the product in advance.
For example: If your billing for the new season will start in September, but you'd like to accept bookings before the season starts, you can use the ‘members to be forced to purchase the next period/season’ setting. If this option isn't set, the system will consider any bookings made pre-September to be for the current season.
Steps:
- Navigate to Product management > Products
- Select the subscription product (group) from the left sidebar
- Open ‘Billing and renewal’ and scroll down to ‘Billing’
- Locate ‘Please enter the number of days prior to the current membership period ending that you would like members to be forced to purchase the next period/season (instead of buying remainder of the current membership period).’
- Set here, the number of days before the billing date that you'd like to stop taking registrations for the current season and start taking sign-ups for the next
- The 'Last purchase date for current period' field will show the last day new sign-ups can purchase the current season
- Any bookings made after that 'last purchase date' will sign up for the upcoming season and created a scheduled order can be manually adjusted there
Tip: To prevent sign-ups entirely, you can make a product private under ‘Details’. Many clubs to this to close sign-ups for a few months, then re-open them using the settings above to take next season’s sign-ups.