Terminating a membership with automatic payment
When a customer wants to cancel a membership that has automatic renewal and billing, you need to check for and handle any upcoming membership as well.
Why this matters
When auto-renewal is enabled, the system creates a new upcoming membership before the current one ends. If you only terminate the current membership, the upcoming one remains active and the customer will still be charged.
How to terminate correctly
- Open the customer profile.
- Check if there are two memberships listed: the current one and an upcoming one.
- Disable auto-renewal on the current membership – click the edit icon and turn off auto-renewal. This prevents new memberships from being created.
- If an upcoming membership already exists, remove it as well.
- The current membership will run until its end date and then expire without renewal.
What auto-renewal does
When a membership type has Paid on renewal enabled:
- The system automatically creates a new membership for the next period when the current one is about to expire.
- If the customer has a saved card, payment is charged automatically.
- If the payment fails, the system retries automatically. After multiple failures, auto-renewal is disabled and the customer is notified.
See Membership status for information about payment failure handling.