Manage payment schedules for your templates

You can easily bulk pause and resume all subscriptions linked to a subscription template using Payment schedules.

Please note:

This feature is only available for subscription templates that have their payment collection date set to “Collect on a specific date”.
All individual subscriptions tied to the subscription template will be affected by the pause / resume (if you want more information on how to pause an individual subscription see here).
When a subscription template is paused, individual subscriptions tied to that template can not be individually resumed - you will only be able to resume a subscription template in bulk.

How to pause all subscriptions

Go to your subscription template details page
Click Manage followed by Payment Schedule
Click Schedule new pause
Choose your pause method
Select your date(s)
Review the summary panel information before continuing

Subscription pause timeline-1.png

Subscription pause timeline-2.png

When planning a pause for your subscription template, it is important to consider your scheme's notice period. If you plan to skip the upcoming charge date and it falls within the notice period specified by your scheme, the payment will not be skipped as this would not allow enough time for the change to be processed. The scheme notice period refers to the amount of notice that has to be provided to your customers when making changes to their subscription i.e. in advance of pausing their subscription. To find out what your scheme’s notice period is, please see below:

SCHEME	REGION	SCHEME NOTICE PERIOD
ACH	United States	1 business day
Autogiro	Sweden	8 business days
Bacs	United Kingdom	3 business days
BECS NZ	New Zealand	10 calendar days
BECS AU	Australia	14 calendar days
Betalingsservice	Denmark	M-8 business days (where M is the month the payment is due)
PAD	Canada	3 business days
PayTo	Australia	0 days
Sepa CORE	Eurozone	3 business days

Managing payment schedules

You can view pending actions under the ‘Scheduled’ section of the payments schedule page. Once an action takes effect, it will move to the ‘Current’ section of the page.

Subscription pause timeline.png

Resuming a pause

Once the pause has taken effect, you can choose to resume the template schedule again for all subscriptions.

If you choose to pause it until further notice, you can resume and choose your start date.

If you choose to pause it between set dates it will resume automatically, however you can decide to change resume dates and choose your new start date.

As with scheduling a pause, please note that you will not be able to resume for a charge date which is less than X days in the future, with X being your relevant scheme’s notice period (see above).

Cancelling a scheduled action

To cancel a scheduled pause or resume action, you have the flexibility to do so up until X days prior to the scheduled start date. X corresponds to the notice period required by your relevant scheme (specified in the “scheme notice period” table above). This is because after this period, the pause / resume action may have already been initiated in the background to account for the required notice days.

From this point, you need to wait until the scheduled action becomes active before you can make any changes.

To better understand when your customers are notified, please refer to the 'Customer Notifications' section.

Who will be affected?

All subscriptions within a template will be affected.

It’s important to note that:

Once a template schedule has been paused, any new customers added to the template will also be automatically paused (i.e. you have to have all customers in the template paused at the same time).
As long as the bulk pause is active, you won’t be able to resume any individual subscriptions. Resuming will only be possible in bulk (i.e. you have to resume all customers in the template at the same time).

Customer notifications

In addition to existing notifications (for example advance notice to let your customers know when a payment is due to be taken from their account), customers will be notified straight away when you

Schedule a pause
Schedule a resume
Make changes to your scheduled action (cancel or change the resume date)

Please note:

If you have turned off GoCardless email notifications it is your responsibility to ensure the required notifications are provided to your customers, at the right time (according to your scheme’s notice period), and contain all the required information. You can find out more about Custom Notifications here.