Chargify Release Notes
We’ve started publishing public release notes to our docs site: http://docs.chargify.com/release-notes
We didn’t keep formal “version” numbers before this, so we started the list with a very arbitrary “v1.1.0”.
Statements
Statements are a great way for both you and your customers to see a line-item breakdown of the charges, payments, credits, and activity for a subscription account on a period-by-period basis. We “pre-released” this feature 2 weeks ago and on Friday we finalized that release.
For any subscription, you can switch to the Statements view and then page between the usage periods for an at-a-glance view of everything that has affected the subscription balance. This is really handy when reviewing someone’s account history.
What’s really great is that you can also share these Statements with the customer via email. If you select the option, Chargify will automatically send out a pretty, HTML-formatted email to the customer when their statement period closes. You guys have been asking for line-item ability on receipts for a while, and this is our solution for that. Statements can completely replace your existing receipts, but they can also be used in conjunction if you choose.
We’ll be opening up the API for statements soon, which will give you access to every piece of data that we use to generate the statements ourselves. Also, we’re making available a pre-rendered HTML snippet that you can fetch via API and drop in for “native” statements, styled however you please.
Zferral integration
One of the long-standing most requested features on our feature request forum has been referral tracking. We were always hesitant to build this into Chargify because it was outside of our realm of expertise. After all, we’re always urging companies to focus on what makes their product unique, and offload the hard, boring billing stuff to us.
We’ve been working with the fine folks over at Zferral to integrate their custom referral and Saas affiliate software into Chargify. News of the integration broke last week on TechCrunch and we released it earlier this week. Their system meshes perfectly with ours, since they allow you to set up campaigns that will reward your affiliates on both subscription signups and their recurring revenue.
We can’t wait for you to try it out and let us know what you think. So mobilize your army of affiliates and reward them for sending you new business! Our Zferral integration docs and a free Chargify Developer’s account are a good place to start!
Customizable Dunning
Chargify Dunning strategies just got a whole lot more customizable! Our latest release gives you more control over how long failed renewals are retried, and what action to take at every step along the way.
How it used to be…
The old Chargify dunning strategies lacked the ability to truly customize when customer communications were sent. Either you had us send the dunning emails or you didn’t. Either way, failed renewals would trigger retries for either 14 or 21 days, at which point the subscription would always be automatically canceled if no successful payment was made.
The new way…
You decide! We’ve renamed the Settings tab for Dunning to “Retries and Dunning” and broken the configuration into two logical sections: Retries and Final Action and Dunning.
In Retries and Final Action, you can choose how many times you want to retry the failed renewal before the subscription is either canceled or marked as unpaid. For example, now you can choose to simply mark the subscription as unpaid after the first failed renewal attempt and manage subsequent retries yourself. Optionally, you can choose to send the customer an email at the end of this retry period, and you can even BCC yourself.
Under Dunning, you can configure periodic dunning emails that can be sent to your customer at any point in the retry process up until the retry period ends. The content of these emails has always been configurable, but when they were sent was not. Now you’re in control!
This feature is intended to give you more control over how you interact with your customers, and hopefully allow you to manage the dunning process in a manner that is better aligned with your business practices. Let us know what you think on Twitter or here in the comments.
More detailed documentation is available: Chargify Dunning Documenation
Also, the new ‘unpaid’ subscription state is documented: Chargify Subscription Unpaid State Documentation
API Change - “Credits” become “Adjustments”
We’re making a small change to the Chargify API and we wanted you to know about it. If you use the API to pull Transactions or create Credits, then you’ll want to read on to see what’s changing. If you don’t do either of these things, you shouldn’t need to change anything. Read on to learn about the details of the change and the new functionality that’s coming with it.
What’s Changing
We are changing the way Chargify “Credit” Transactions work behind the scenes. Today, Credits deduct an amount from a Subscription’s balance, but are represented with a positive “amount”. For example:
| Old Subscription Balance: | $40 |
| Applied Credit Amount: | $30 |
| New Subscription Balance: | $10 |
Since it would be nice to also adjust the balance up in some cases, we’re introducing Adjustments. Adjustments with positive amounts make the balance go up, Adjustments with negative amounts make the balance go down (like Credits). For example:
| Old Subscription Balance: | $40 |
| Applied Adjustment 1: | -$30 |
| Applied Adjustment 2: | $5 |
| New Subscription Balance: | $15 |
Internally, we’re converting all existing Credits to Adjustments.
What this means for you
If you create Credits today via the API, then you’ll still be able to make the same API call you do already - you’ll still specify a positive amount to credit, which will cause the balance to go down. However, the resource that is actually created will be an Adjustment with a negative amount. This will be reflected back to you in the API response when you successfully create a Credit - the amount will be negative and the transaction_type will be ‘adjustment’.
You’ll also be able to create Adjustments — both positive and negative — directly from the API and forget about Credits if you want.
If you pull Transactions via the API, you will no longer see transactions with transaction_type of ‘credit’. If you display account transactions in your app or service, you may need to add support for the new Adjustments.
Implementation Date
These changes will go live between 1am and 7am EST on Saturday, December 18th.
Conclusion
With the introduction of Adjustments, you’ll have more control over the current balance of your subscriptions and be able to make arbitrary changes much more easily.
This change has made us think about introducing versioning to the API, but we’re holding off on that for now. Since creating Credits still works just as it did, and we’re only extending functionality by adding Adjustments, we hope that no one will need to make any changes to their implementations. If you have any concerns or comments, please let us know
Activity Stream and Gateway Logs
Early this morning we released a new view on your Chargify Dashboard! Now, when you sign in and access a Site you will see a stream of recent “Activity” that includes all of your signups (both successful AND unsuccessful), renewals, payments, and more, to give you a better overall view of “What’s Happening”. You’ll also see a breakdown of your signups and revenue this month vs. last month, per product, to see how you’re stacking up to past performance.
We’ve been collecting the data for the events for a while, but we just turned on improved tracking this morning. Hence, events from before this morning won’t contain as much rich information as the events going forward.
Note that for failed signups you can now see the reason for failure and, in most cases, clicking on the reason text will take you to a Gateway Log view. This view is helpful for viewing the full response from the gateway to and to diagnose issues.
Clicking on “View all events” from the bottom of the Dashboard’s Recent Events will bring you to a filterable view of all of your Site’s events. Clicking any of the filters at the top will narrow your view to only those events.
We hope you enjoy!
Modify the next billing date
We recently launched the ability to modify the next billing date associated with a subscription. Possible use cases for this feature include:
- Extending a customer’s trial period
- Adding extra time onto a customer’s subscription
- Aligning subscription renewals with a date that makes more sense to your business’ lifecycle
For documentation on what dates Chargify tracks, and how to modify them, you can check out: http://docs.chargify.com/billing-dates
Webhooks released
Over the weekend, we formally released our new Webhook system! The eagle-eyed of you may have noticed an early release of Webhooks as far back as 2 weeks ago, but now there are more events to which you can Subscribe.
From the Webhooks documentation:
Webhooks offer a way to quickly find out about changes to your Subscriptions that happen within Chargify. You can subscribe to events of interest, and we’ll post data to the URL you specify when one of those events occurs.
The events we currently offer are:
- signup success/failure
- renewal success/failure
- payment success/failure
- subscription state change
Webhooks provide much more information in their payload than our old Post-backs, and should make it even easier to integrate your app with Chargify. We think you’ll like them so much, that Webhooks will eventually totally replace the old Post-back system.
A final note: Webhooks are currently an “alpha” level feature and are subject to change. Please subscribe to this Changelog and/or our @chargify Twitter stream in order to follow our development. But please do move forward with implementing them – we value your feedback!
Bugfix: Product ‘handle’ uniqueness and behavior upon archive
We’ve just released a bugfix for the Product API ‘handle’. Most of you shouldn’t notice, but just in case it causes unexpected behavior for some of you we wanted to make note.
There was a bug that allowed non-unique Product handles within a single Site. This could cause unexpected behavior when doing a Product lookup via the API, or when creating an new Subscription via the API using a ‘product_handle’ value. This has been fixed.
The behavior of archived Products has also been slightly altered:
- Upon archiving, the handle on a Product is removed (so it can be used again)
- Hosted signup pages are unavailable for archived Products
- Subscriptions may NOT be created to an archived Product (via the API or otherwise)
- Subscriptions may NOT be migrated to an archived Product (via the API or otherwise)
IF you have duplicate Product handle’s within a single Site, behavior won’t change for you unless you go to edit and save one of those Products - at that point you will be notified of the duplication and you’ll need to pick a new handle. Note: we may decide to identify any duplicates and notify you directly so that we can “cleanse” the system of this issue completely.
Improved access to your Chargify transaction details
Late last week we launched a new feature that will give you more insight into how Chargify is interacting with your Payment Gateway.
When you visit the Transactions tab in the main navigation, you will now see “View Details” links next to each transaction. Clicking this link will bring you to the Transaction detail page.
This page includes:
- Basic information about the transaction
- Information about the gateway used in the transaction
- The Raw Request and Raw Response for the transaction
Of most interest is the Raw Request and Response data. These show exactly what Chargify is sending to the gateway and what the gateway is returning to Chargify.
