Roll Out of Invoices Plus and Paid Subscriptions (is this the way it works?)

[tomasguitarra]

I have used Square in one of my small businesses - which is an honors-level program in guitar for young people.  I run a small selective program that serves about 15 clients and runs on an annual tuition model. My bills go out at the beginning of the academic year - late August and September.  Many clients wish to pay their tuition on a monthly basis, and splitting their payments into milestones works very well to set this up.  When I set these invoices up, I did so with a reminder for each monthly payment that was scheduled to go out on the invoice due date.    Today I found out that all of the payment reminders that  I set up in September (to go out on the payment due date) were turned off.   At first I thought that I must have made an error in setting up the invoices - that I set them up without turning on any reminders.  But upon further reflection I realized that I would not have done this - they had to have been turned off at some point by some external person or force (but not by me)    Furthermore, I went on my invoices platform tonight and tried to restore the payment reminders for each client who was on a monthly payment plan.  The system seemed to allow this - showing the reminders as activated. I then saved and updated the invoice.  Out went an automated e-mail notifying me that the invoice was updated.    Great.  But I then double checked each invoice and NONE of my changes were actually saved.  NADA. NIENTE.   So an hour of tedious administrative work was down the drain.  The system allowed, even encouraged, me to waste an hour of my time updating invoices that only appeared to be updating - but in fact weren't.  ("Gotcha!").   Upon seeing that my efforts were fruitless, I tried to figure out the cause.   It turns out my  "Invoices Plus trial subscription expired" on 12/1/2021.   The only problem is that I never "subscribed" to invoices plus.  In September and prior to September, I used features that were available for me to use in the best way possible for my business.   I don't appear to have received any e-mail notifying me of "upcoming changes" and that features that were integral to my invoicing system were going to be discontinued unless I upgraded my service to a paid subscription.   I never saw any banner on the Square site notifying me of this change. 

As a result, all of my clients who were on monthly payment stopped receiving invoice reminders at some point  (not quite clear when).  This has resulted in numerous late payments  (cash flow issues) and also clients complaining when I send manual late payment reminders that they never received notice that the invoice was due.  This makes me look unorganized and unprofessional.  Square receives $350 to $450 for each client who pays annual tuition on the Square platform.  So it is not like I am using the Square platform for free.     

Let's see what the official and community response may be to this posting.  I run three different businesses and I am sometimes spread thin, perhaps I made a mistake or overlooked something along the way.  But the way that this is being done, based on my experience tonight, would seem to be lacking in basic consideration.

[Minion]

Hi @tomasguitarra 

I'm not sure if there what would constitute an official response, but from one seller to another, I'll try to help you out.  LIke you, I use invoices 99% of the time in my business.  The estimates/contracts/projects sections of the Invoice Plus subscription don't really appeal to me since I've only used them a handful of times combined.  I'm not sure if you use any of those other features or not with your lessons, maybe the contracts?

You were most likely auto-subscribed to the invoice plus since you were using features that were part of its "paid" plan. Now according to this article, comparing the features with free and paid version your current milestone reminders should have been able to continue, and maybe it was some sort of glitch or error with it not sending and the "free subscription ending".  But even so, the reminder part is part of the free version as well.  So that problem of not sending reminders may be something itself that may need to be looked into further

While you may need to change how/when customers are charged, you can switch from a milestone based payments, to recurring based invoices for those who want to split their monthly payments up.  The recurring invoice feature is part of the free and paid version.  I guess it would be a work around, and you would have to change up how/when your customers pay.  

As for being notified, don't quote me on this but you *should* have received an email if you are subscribed to the changes made to invoices if you are subscribed to product updates.  You can check this out from your account dashboard navigate to Accounts & Settings>Email Notifications>Account Emails and Product Updates should be checked.  I believe that is the one for new roll out features. 

Hope some of this information helps.

[tomasguitarra]

Thank you for this very helpful response, which at least helps narrow down some of the possible issues.  It seems that I had "product updates" turned of in my notification preferences - thus no e-mail notification.   Also, though I seriously doubt that I didn't set payment reminders for my milestone payments invoices when I set them up - it is possible.  (I don't have any "proof" like a screen shot that shows that they were set up).   

The one element that doesn't make sense is that I was unable to reset payment reminders on my milestone invoices last night.  The article that you link here says:  "If you choose not to subscribe when your free trial ends, you can still edit any multi-package estimates, invoice templates, milestone-based payment schedules, project folders, or custom fields you created in the past year. However, you won’t be able to create any new invoices using these features".    My invoices were created during the period of my free trial and thus I should be able to edit all aspects of them.  As you say: ("your current milestone reminders should have been able to continue").  However, this doesn't appear to be the case based on my experience last night.   Perhaps it is that "milestone payment schedules" do not include reminders.     So I will have to do a screen recording documenting my inability to save edits in milestone reminders.  Because my invoices cover a period running from September to June, it would be an administrative nightmare to create new recurring payment invoices mid-term.   Once again, thank you for your helpful response. 

[Minion]

Not a problem @tomasguitarra .  Yeah I highly doubt as well that you didn't have the reminders set up properly, and thus thinking it's most likely a bug or glitch.

I'll see if I can do some digging as well and see about if those milestone prior to the free service, also include reminders and report  back either way.

Cheers