Subscription Boss 1.12 Released With Payment Plan Bug Fix and Enhancements

The Subscription Boss 1.12 release has an important bug fix and a few enhancements.

Who Should Upgrade?

The bug fix is important for those who are using payment plans.

Unprocessed Payment Plan Payments

Since the Infusionsoft e-commerce updates in January 2012 the PayPal Profile ID has not been stored on the Infusionsoft Order and hence second and later payments remain unprocessed.

Clicking “Reprocess IPN” on the payment does not have any effect as the original order has not been tagged with the PayPal Profile ID.

The manual fix for this is to copy the PayPalProfileID from the IPN Notification and then save it in the paypal_profile_id field which is on the Custom Fields tab on the Order. Only then you can reprocess the IPN successfully.

Why Did It Stop Working?

As part of the e-commerce enhancements release in early January, Infusionsoft changed the database design so the InvoiceId on the Job (Order) table is no longer populated. SubscriptionBoss was using the InvoiceId field to find the order for a particular invoice. In the new release SubscriptionBoss uses the JobId on the Invoice table to find the Order (exciting stuff, yeah? Not!). Anyway the bug is now fixed and this means any new orders will be processed correctly. However any unprocessed payments will need manual processing as described above.

What Else Is In The Release?

There are a few improved plugin features and some useful additions to the documentation.

Improved Order Confirmation Page

The Order Confirmation Page contains the short-code [subb-confirm]

The short-code adds the following:

  • A row with the initial charges, a description, and any associated tax payable
  • A row with the recurring charges, a description indicating when they take place, and any associated tax payable
  • A row with the total charges, somea description, and any associated tax payable
  • A row with the charge to be taken today, and any associated tax payable
  • A “Confirm Order” button

In the new release the “total charges” row is removed when there is an open ended subscription as the “total” price cannot be given as it depends on how many months the buyer remains a member.

Tax Calculation

In the previous release the plugin calculated the tax payable and then added it as an Order Item. This would occasionally fail if there was an inconsistency on how tax had been set up on Infusionsoft and how it had been set up on SubscriptionBoss.

In the new release, SubscriptionBoss uses the Infusionsoft API function to calculate what tax is payable.

Amount Owed Is Recalculated

In some circumstances for the previous release the payment was being added to the invoice but the balance was still showing as being outstanding.

In the new release SubscriptionBoss uses the Infusionsoft API function to calculate the Amount Owed which will set the Amount Outstanding to zero on single payment orders.

New Video Tutorials

There are two new video tutorials; one to find your Infusionsoft product ID and another to find the Infusionsoft program ID.

The concept of a Product ID remains straightforward however the subscription ID exists as both a CProgramID and a SubscriptionPlanID in the database. It is not entirely clear where Infusionsoft are going with this but the direction of travels seems to indicate that the CProgramID will eventually be removed and the SubscriptionPlanID will be retained.

Improved Documentation

I finally spent some time putting a post together than outlined the nine different ways of glueing a product and a subscription together with or without payment plans and free trial periods.

How To Upgrade

To upgrade to the new version, log on to your site as an administrator, go to the Plugins page and click the “update automatically” link for SubscriptionBoss

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