Recurring Subscription

Hi,
Membership Pro was set up a few or so years ago. For members who pay by direct debit they were set up with a manual end date 5 years or so after they subscribed. In December  DD members were sent emails by the system telling them there subscription was running out, because there 5 years was up. This did not seem a good way of handling things, so I set up plans for people who pay by direct debit and made them recurring plans, in the hope that then they would not get messages and their subscription would just continue year on year until it was cancelled by us as the Direct Debit had not been paid. I changed the membership plan for all of the people who paid by direct debit to one of these plans, and hoped that would solve the problem. However when there subscription end date arrived, which had been sent in their previous plan, the system expired their memberships.. I went through and activated them again, but a short while later the system expired them again. I tried clearing the subscription end date, but still the system after a short while expired them again. What changes do I need to make to their subscription information to stop their subscriptions expiring and remaining active until I cancel them?

Thanks

Jon

Hi Jon

There is no way to make manual subscriptions created before become automatic recurring subscription as you said. If you want them to be automatic renewal, users need to come back to your site, renew their subscription manually (they need to provide credit card details during renewal) so that the system can process automatic renewal later

Regards,

Tuan

Thank you for your reply. These members do not pay via the website but via a third party. They were all created manually, by admin, and not by the front end web site.
All of these members have now been added to this plan which is set to recurring. If I know change this "recurring" plan to a non-recurring one and set lifetime membership to yes, will they then become lifetime members? Or is it more the case that the member's subscription plan does not change and is stuck at the settings they were originally given when they were created?
Looking through the documentation I see there is a Subscription Control Plugin. Could I use this to transfer them into the same plan when they "expire" and would it then make them "recurring"?

Regards,

Jon

Hi Jon

Change settings of a plan will only affect new subscribers of that plan. The old subscribers will still use old settings

For your need, the easiest way would be running some kind of SQL code to update subscription end date of these subscriptions to make them become lifetime subscriptions

Otherwise, use Subscription control to assign them to the new lifetime plan could be an option, too

Tuan