Memberships and subscriptions for your users

Smoothbook allows you to offer flexible and varied payment options to your users.

This page discusses creating memberships or subscriptions (automated recurring charges) for your users. For more information on creating single appointment charges or packages / class passes, please click here.

This article discusses the creation and configuration of memberships / subscriptions for your users. For information on managing your user’s memberships once they have purchased one please click here.

Memberships and subscriptions

Memberships are a very powerful way for you to add value to your business and convenience for your customers. Your customers have automated and recurring access to your services; you have automatic repeat business.

By creating a membership you can offer some or all of your services in return for an automatic recurring payment from your users. You can also create memberships that award a package or packages to your users every time the membership is renewed.

Memberships and Stripe

Memberships and their payments are created and managed through Stripe. If you create a membership in Smoothbook you will be able to see it in Stripe by opening your Stripe account and clicking on ‘products’ under the billing tab.

PLEASE BE CAREFUL WHEN CREATING OR MODIFYING YOUR PRODUCTS OR SUBSCRIPTIONS THROUGH YOUR STRIPE ACCOUNT.

You should only modify your Smoothbook memberships through Smoothbook; updates to your subscriptions and products that you make through Stripe will not necessarily be reflected in Smoothbook.

  • Subscriptions / products created in Stripe will not be created in Smoothbook – you must create the membership in Smoothbook for the product to be created in Stripe.

Billing Cycles / plans

The period of time between payments for a membership is called a billing cycle or a plan. In Smoothbook billing cycles are always in months and you can create as many as you like for a given membership plan. So you could create one charge if your user pays every month and another if your user pays every three months. The largest billing cycle you can offer is 12 months, meaning your user will be charged every 12 months.

  • Your user can only have one plan per membership at a time.

Creating memberships

To create a membership select ‘settings’ from the main menu and click on the ‘charging’ icon. Scroll down the page and you’ll see a section labelled ‘memberships’.

Awarding services with a membership

By awarding a membership to your users you can give them unlimited access to one or more of your services. You can alternatively or, in addition, award packages to your users every time the membership renews.

By assigning services to the membership you are giving your users unlimited access to those services as long as their membership is active.

Awarding packages with a membership

For more information on using packages / class passes with Smoothbook please click here

If you assign packages to a membership those packages will be awarded to the user at the end of each billing cycle / every time their membership is renewed. Please note that unless a package has an expiry the customer’s credits for that package will accumulate with every billing cycle. If you wish the package to be renewed with every billing cycle please set an expiry on the package equal to the length of the billing cycle. (So if your membership has a billing cycle of one month you would set an expiry of 31 days after purchase for your package).

– We do not generally recommend creating memberships that allow access to services *and* award packages

Legal / Refunds / PSD2 / Strong Customer Authentication

Smoothbook is fully compliant with new European PSD2 regulations regarding online payments and Secure Customer Authentication. By processing payments via Smoothbook you are agreeing to all relevant terms and conditions from Smoothbook, Stripe, as well as all relevant regulations regarding online payments and ‘distance selling’ that apply in the UK and European Union.

There are strict rules in Europe regarding online selling and in particular automated offline payments – payments taken automatically when the customer is not present. When your customer creates a membership / subscription they agree to a ‘mandate’ or contract. The terms of this mandate can be seen here .

Simply, the terms of the mandate are:

  • The customer can cancel their subscription anytime they like
  • If they cancel, their membership will remain valid to the end of the billing cycle under the terms that they signed up under.
  • They will no longer be billed if they cancel.
  • Generally there are no refunds on payments already made. It is up to you, the service provider to decide if you will offer a refund if the customer asks for one.