How can you pause or suspend a recurring invoice?

[Koawood]

[The title of this thread has been edited from the original: Temporary Pause on Recurring Series]

With the current COVID-19 situation, many business are temporarily closing. For those of us who have recurring payments (subscriptions or series) with our clients for services we cannot currently offer, how do we pause or suspend these series?

[#2]

Hey @Koawood-

Thanks for posting in the Seller Community.

We don't have a way of temporarily pausing or suspending recurring Invoices at this time. You can either end the current Invoices series (and create a new one when things get up and running), or you can adjust the next payment date to extend the time frame so they won't be charged this or next month. If you'd like to adjust the payment date, head to the Invoices section of your Square Dashboard and select the recurring invoice you'd like to change. From there, select Edit Series, then locate the Next Invoice button to make the adjustment:

We realize that recent events have impacted our seller's day-to-day business and sales. I hope this suggestion is helpful. Having a suspend or pause button for Square Invoices is a fantastic feature request that we received in the past, and input like yours is very helpful to the product teams that develop these features. Please let me know if you have any questions about this information, or if there's anything else we can do for you during this time✨

[#3]

Hi @kfunch, welcome to the seller community and thanks for bringing this up!

You can edit the payment amount and date from your Invoices tab, though the ability to automatically send a prorated invoice in a recurring series is not available. For now, I would suggest sending a single invoice for the initial partial amount, then you can create the recurring invoice series for the full amount when the next payment is due.

I can see how this feature would help streamline your workflow. Rest assured that I'll be sharing your post with our Product Liaison team. We'll circle back with any updates or additional options as they're available.

Thanks for your patience, and let us know if you have any other questions. 🙂

[AshleyK]

Hey @CanadianFade thank you for taking the time to explain how this would be beneficial to your business. I agree that having the ability to pause a recurring invoice would be incredibly helpful to sellers at this time who want to maintain the invoices, but maybe don't want to charge their customers for a period of time. 

I will definitely bubble your feedback to our team again, but unfortunately I do not have a timeline for when this will be released. 

In the meantime, the only workaround for this would be to cancel that recurring series and to recreate the series when you are ready to bill your customers again. I know this is not the ideal workaround for you, but it will be a sure way to make sure your customers are not billed outside of their recurring cycle. 

[LunaticLens]

I also need this feature to to the Covid-19 pandemic.  I use the recurring invoice feature for monthly membership billing to my customers.  I refunded April's dues due to the Covid closure, and would like to idle (pause) the recurring invoices for May, instead of ending them all!  This is a badly-needed feature during these times of uncertainty!

[Joe]

Thanks for adding your voice and flagging your desire for this feature to us, @LunaticLens! As Ashley mentioned, our Product & Development Team has eyes on this and it working towards bringing this feature to fruition.

We will continue to update everyone here on this thread as we have news to share. Thanks, again!

[Alexandros]

Hi all, I need to pause a recurring invoice for one of my clients for a couple of weeks and I was wondering how to do so.

Thank you.

Be well,

Alessandro

[Arie]

Hi @Alexandros,

Thanks for writing in! I've merged your post to this thread - check out the best answer for a workaround on pausing a recurring invoice. 

PS. I noticed it's your first post, welcome to our community 👋