Subscriptions: money that arrives again next month

You describe what you sell once. A plan is a price and a frequency (₹48,000 a year for a press AMC, ₹2,500 a month for managed hosting), with an optional free trial, an optional setup fee, and an optional number of cycles after which it ends by itself. An addon bolts on: an extra seat, a fourth service visit, another site. A coupon takes a percentage or an amount off, for the first invoice, for a set number of cycles, or for as long as it runs.

Then you put a customer on one. Four steps: who and what, what else, on what terms, and a review screen showing exactly what they are about to be charged before anything is written. That review is not an estimate: it is built by the same code that raises the real invoice, so the figure on the screen is the figure on the invoice, to the paisa.

A plan’s price is copied onto the subscription at the moment of sale, not pointed at. Put your prices up next year and your existing customers carry on at what they agreed, unless you tell a particular subscription otherwise. Getting that the other way round would reprice everybody the day somebody edited a catalogue entry.

A customer on ₹300 a month moves to ₹500 on the fifteenth. Ten days used, twenty left. JAI CRM raises a credit note for ₹200 (the unused part of what they already paid) and an invoice for ₹333.33, the new plan over the twenty days remaining. They pay the ₹133.33 difference.

Both documents, not one netted figure. The netted number is easier to produce and impossible to explain, and explaining it is exactly what happens when the customer reaches for a calculator. The days are counted from the calendar rather than assumed to be thirty, because February exists.

A change can also be scheduled: at the end of the term, or on a date. An upgrade agreed today for the first of next month waits there and lands on its own.

Four answers, per subscription. Keep the price agreed at the start: the default, and the one that does not surprise anybody. Use whatever the plan says today, for arrangements that should track your list price. Or move it by a percentage at every renewal, or every second or third one: ₹100 becomes ₹110, then ₹121, then ₹133.10, compounding on the price actually in force, which is what everybody who has ever said “ten per cent a year” meant.

No. Nothing changed in Sales, Sales documents, Inventory or your books, and no existing invoice, customer or recurring-invoice profile was touched. Subscriptions is a new module: switch it on and it is there, leave it off and nothing about your workspace is different.

Your existing recurring invoices are untouched and go on working exactly as they did. They are still the right tool for an invoice that simply repeats: a fixed monthly retainer with no upgrades, no trials and nothing to prorate. Subscriptions is for arrangements that have a life: they start, change, pause, renew at a different price and eventually end, and the figures need to know.

Invoices a subscription raises are ordinary invoices and are numbered from your ordinary invoice series, so GST, ageing, payments and the ledger see nothing new.