Migrating a Subscription

The subscription migration feature provides a powerful way for you to manage the way customers' services evolve.

Migrations can be used to manage:

• Upgrades and downgrades
• Frequency changes (e.g. migrate from monthly to yearly in the same Plan)
• Free trial conversions
• Plan updates (e.g. migrate to the 2020 version of a legacy Plan)
• "Custom" migrations

Prerequisites

To support subscription migrations, the Plan Family must be configured and relationships and rules defined within the family. These identify which migration paths are valid and what the system should do when migrating from one subscription to another.

These settings are defined in the Catalog; please see Creating Plan Families for more information.

Subscriptions that belong to Plan Families and have valid migration paths will have a Migrate button on the Subscriptions grid.

To Migrate a subscription

1. On the Subscription page, select a subscription and then click the Migrate button.
2. Select a destination plan from a list in the Migration wizard destination page and click Next.
   
3. On the Migration Configuration page, click when the migration will occur.
   • Now - The migration will occur as soon as you finish the wizard. The source subscription will be in "migrated" status, and the new subscription will be active.
   • On the next billing period - The migration will occur on the source subscription's next billing period.
   • On a specific date - Choose a date on which the migration will be scheduled. For example, this can be particularly handy for setting up a 14-day free trial.
4. You can override any Relationship defaults configured in the Catalog from the dropdown lists. For more information about these settings, see Managing Relationships and Rules.
5. Click Preview Migration or Migrate, depending on your selections.

Note: If you migrate on the next billing period or specific date, click Done to complete the migration schedule.

1. If you selected Now, review the invoice that will be generated.
   • Click Migrate Subscription to complete the migration and generate the new invoice. The source subscription will be marked as "Migrated" in the Subscription grid, and the new subscription will become "Active."
   
   

What Happens When a Subscription is Migrated?

When you complete a migration, Stax Bill does all of the "heavy lifting" in the back end to ensure that the billing, accounting, and reporting remain accurate. Here's a list of the things that happen when the migration occurs:

• If there are charge reversals, the new invoice will automatically use available funds from those charges before it attempts to charge the customer's payment method for any additional charges incurred due to the migration event. The customer will see this on their new invoice as a reduction in the amount owing (and collected if they are on auto-collect).
• Earnings are correctly calculated based on the settings configured in the Catalog; partial/pro-rated reversals are handled on the source subscription, and the earnings for the destination subscription begin as of the time of migration.
• MRR Contraction is recorded for the source subscription, and MRR Growth is recorded for the destination subscription
• If the two subscriptions are the same frequency, then the destination subscription "adopts" the source subscription's billing period so that the billing date remains the same. Pro-ration rules are respected.
• If the two subscriptions are of different frequencies (e.g. monthly and annual), then the destination subscription creates a new billing period starting on the day of the migration.
• Projected invoices are updated to remove any projections for the old subscription, and new ones are generated for the destination subscription.
• The migration action is audit logged.

What Happens When I Schedule on Next Billing Period or Specific Date?

The same things happen to a scheduled migration as if you were migrating now, as described above. In addition, a few other things will happen at the time of the migration:

• Any end of period charges billed in arrears will be calculated according to the source plan's pricing (i.e. the one you are migrating from) at the billing period rollover. This usage charge will show up as a line item on the new invoice, along with the new start of period recurring charge for the destination plan.
• In the Subscriptions grid for a customer, if a subscription is scheduled to be migrated, you can see the scheduled migration date:
  
• If the scheduled date is on the next billing period, then any counters (discount periods, uplifts, etc.) will be decremented before the destination subscription is active. If the scheduled date does not fall on a billing period boundary, then none of these counters are decremented.
• You can change and/or cancel the scheduled migration anytime up to the scheduled date by clicking the Migrate button again and moving through the wizard. A Remove Migration button at the bottom of the wizard allows you to cancel the scheduled migration. The current (source) subscription will remain active, and the migration plan will be removed from the system.
  
  Note: Changes made to the destination Plan during the time that this migration is scheduled will be reflected in the migrated subscription when it occurs. The system does not keep a "snapshot in time" of the destination plan when you schedule the migration.