Before a billing run charges an installment, sends a reminder, cancels a declined schedule, or emails a statement, it plans those actions first. During planning, Rhythm creates a reviewable list of pending actions. It does not charge, send, cancel, or email anything yet.
This article explains what planning checks, and why a customer might or might not appear in the plan.
Planning Produces a Plan, Nothing More
When a billing run plans, it checks the options you turned on: charging, declined-payment reminders, cancellations, expiring-card reminders, and statements. It creates one pending action for each action it plans to take.
Planning does not change a schedule, invoice, or customer record. It only creates pending actions and updates the run's statistics, so you can review the plan from Finance & Billing › Billing before Rhythm carries anything out.
Which Installment Schedules Get Charged
For charging, the run selects every active installment schedule whose next billing date falls within the run's configured window. Only active schedules qualify. If a schedule is in any other status, Rhythm leaves it out of charging, regardless of its dates.
Charging also depends on the billing template's payment-method setup, not just the date window. A billing template set to process credit card installment schedules only charges schedules paid by credit card. For example, Rhythm leaves out a recurring gift or membership paid by ACH, even if its date otherwise qualifies. If a schedule does not have a usable saved payment method for the template billing it, Rhythm leaves it out the same way it leaves out a schedule outside the date window.
When the run processes, it does not charge only the next installment that made the schedule eligible. It charges every open entry up to the end of the window for that schedule. If a schedule has fallen behind and has more than one open entry inside the window, the run bills all of them together.
A schedule's next billing date drives selection, and that date does not always move forward on its own. If an earlier installment entry is still open, such as one that failed or was never resolved, the schedule's next billing date can stay pinned to that earlier entry. When that happens, a later, already-corrected installment is not picked up automatically even though you expect it to be due. Planning can also skip an incomplete or unresolved schedule, such as one stuck mid-processing with no next billing date, and that schedule may be hard to edit directly until the state clears.
If a billing run also advances a renewing membership while charging its installment, a failed advancement can create the renewal's deferral schedule incorrectly. The deferral schedule can stay in the prior accounting period instead of moving forward with the renewal. If a renewed membership's deferral schedule looks like it is in the wrong period, check whether the renewal's billing run action actually completed successfully.
Reminders and Cancellations for Declined Payments
A run can remind customers whose installment payment was declined, using the configured reminder window that matches how long ago the decline happened. If the schedule's decline date falls inside more than one reminder window, Rhythm uses the first matching window in your list. Rhythm does not track whether the customer already received a reminder for that decline, so a later run can remind them again if the date still falls inside a matching window.
A run can also cancel schedules that have stayed declined too long, using one configured cancellation window. Rhythm selects schedules for cancellation during planning, and it does not check again during processing that the schedule is still declined. If the payment is fixed after the plan is created but before the run processes, Rhythm still cancels the schedule as planned. You can also configure a cancellation with no notice, so the schedule can be cancelled without sending the customer an email.
Reminder emails for a declined installment payment do not go out on their own. You must turn on the reminder notifications option in the billing template's settings before a run using that template will send them. The cancellation window also has to be configured there before a run will act on it.
Reminders and cancellations are selected separately. Because of that, the same run can plan both a reminder and a cancellation for the same schedule when its date falls inside both a reminder window and the cancellation window.
Warning Customers About an Expiring Card
The expiring-card reminder only checks schedules that are already in payment-declined status. As it works today, this option does not warn a customer whose payments are still succeeding, even when their saved card is about to expire. It also only has schedules to check when declined-payment reminders or cancellations are turned on for the same run. If expiring-card reminders are the only enabled option, Rhythm does not examine any schedules and does not plan any warnings.
Tip
If you want a run to warn customers about expiring cards, turn on declined-payment reminders or cancellations as well. Remember that this only reaches customers whose payments have already been declined, not customers who are current but have a card expiring soon.
Which Customers Get a Statement
Statements are planned for every customer who has an unpaid invoice, using the same invoice index your account uses elsewhere to find unpaid invoices. There is no age cutoff. An older unpaid invoice qualifies the same way a recent unpaid invoice does. During planning, Rhythm trusts that index instead of recalculating each invoice's balance.
No matter how many unpaid invoices a customer has, the run sends that customer at most one statement. Rhythm removes duplicates within a single planning pass. A contact and an organization that share an identifier are still treated as separate customers, so each can receive their own statement.
Statement runs like this remind customers about any unpaid invoice, not only membership invoices. Planning treats invoices the same regardless of what generated them. That said, a billing run for statements on general open invoices offers less configuration than a membership billing run. It does not currently offer narrowing by invoice age or a specific date the way a membership run's options do. Billing run actions also cannot be filtered or excluded based on whether an invoice's purchase order (PO) field is filled in. A request for that kind of exclusion was declined as a product change. If you need that level of control, custom development against the API is the only alternative today.
Reading a Run's Statistics and Review Report
After planning finishes, the run compiles statistics for how many actions of each type it planned, and how many eventually succeeded or failed. Rhythm updates these counts right after each action finishes running. If an installment charge is still completing in the background at that moment, its final outcome might not appear in the summary right away. If the summary numbers look lower than you expect, check the schedules or the run's action list directly.
If the run has a notification email address, staff receive an email when the plan is ready to review. The email includes a link to open the plan. That link always opens your live account's Console, even when the run was created and planned in your sandbox, so be careful when you follow a plan-ready link from a test run. If you expected the email but never receive it, check the run directly instead of waiting for a retry, because Rhythm does not automatically send a failed notification again.
That email only means pre-processing has finished and the plan is ready for your review. It does not mean anything has been charged, sent, or cancelled yet, and the run does not carry out its plan automatically. You still need to open the run and select Run Now for it to actually process. If there is nothing that needs your attention in a particular run, treat the email as a reminder that the plan is waiting for you, not as a report that billing already happened.
Related
See the related articles for creating or editing a billing run, reviewing and running a billing plan, and what happens to a schedule after each charge attempt.