Manage payment schedules for your templates

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

How to pause all subscriptions

1. Go to your subscription template details page

2. Click Manage followed by Payment Schedule 

3. Click Schedule a pause 

4. Choose your pause method

5. Select your date(s)

6. Review the summary panel information before continuing 

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:

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.

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.