Need Help with Configuration to Make Renewals Work Better.

Doesn't sound like you need the parent plans at all. The child plans are marked exclusive. Exclusive in CBSubs also means mandatory. So a parent plan can't exist without also having the child plan. So you'd have to unsubscribe the parent or make the child plan non-exclusive then just use conditions so they can't select multiple child plans at once.

We use the Parent Plans to organize and simplify what our customers see when they are choosing a plan. I knew we'd be free of all these problems if we got rid of them, but we really don't want to.

I will try changing the child plans to be "non-exclusive" with conditions to prevent customers from selecting more than one plan at a time. My tech skills are very limited, but I will give this a try.

Assuming I'm successful, I can understand how this would solve the problem of renewing to a different parent group when the current plan has expired.

With the 2nd scenario - when a members wants to upgrade "mid-stream", with pro-rating - from one group of plans to a different group of plans, I'm not sure if this will solve that problem too.

I will post what happens.

Thank you very much for your help!

With the 2nd scenario - when a members wants to upgrade "mid-stream", with pro-rating - from one group of plans to a different group of plans, I'm not sure if this will solve that problem too.

Yeah this won't solve that problem. The issue you're having is you're upgrading from 1 parent to another. There is no prorating that I'm aware of from 1 parents child plan to another parents child plan. The best solution for this is to make all your child plans exclusive and have no parent then organize them in some other way (e.g. using CSS or conditions under the Workflows tab).

Thank you for helping me understand what is and isn't possible. Balancing the pros and cons - I think we'll stay with our current structure using Parent Plans to categorize all the plan options and simplify the presentation. It means we'll have to manually help anyone who wants to switch to a plan within a different parent group, but it allows us to present our membership options is a simple, visually clean way. That is more important to us.

Thank you again for your help suggesting we make the parent plans a free, lifetime subscription. This has cleaned up the presentation, and will prevent the kinds of misunderstandings we've had in the past. This is a BIG improvement.

I now have 2 "wish list" items:

1. A way to organize groups of plans under separate headings without needing the heading to be a parent plan. These group headings could hide all the plans in the group unless selected - as our parent plans do now - but the significant difference between these group headings and "parent plans" would be that all the plans could be top level, and members could move from any plan to any plan with prorating in an upgrade, It would also solve the problem of not being able to renew to a plan of a different parent after one's current plan had expired.

2. Ability to download all subscription data to Excel. (I posted this to the wish list blog some time ago.)

Despite having these wish list items, I am enormously grateful to CBSubs. I looked for a long time to find an affordable program to use to create a membership program here on our family farm. CBSubs made that possible - very affordably. We've been using CBSubs since 2012. We rely on it, and we appreciate it - very much!

A HUGE thank you to all of you!
Lucy

It means we'll have to manually help anyone who wants to switch to a plan within a different parent group, but it allows us to present our membership options is a simple, visually clean way. That is more important to us.

That doesn't have to be the case. For example see our Professional plan has 3 different prices. They're all 3 top level plans, but they don't appear to be. The pricing options display as options of 1 plan. This is all done entirely using CSS to overlay them. So it's certainly possible to organize your plans nicely using CSS entirely.

1. A way to organize groups of plans under separate headings without needing the heading to be a parent plan. These group headings could hide all the plans in the group unless selected - as our parent plans do now - but the significant difference between these group headings and "parent plans" would be that all the plans could be top level, and members could move from any plan to any plan with prorating in an upgrade, It would also solve the problem of not being able to renew to a plan of a different parent after one's current plan had expired.

I honestly don't know if this will ever happen. It's quite complicated enough dealing with the various access checks on plans as is. This would just be adding another level of parent plans to the mix. We do have plans to allow linking a parent plans duration to a child plan, which maybe able to help with your issue (e.g. parent plan would always expire same time as child). We probably need to improve the prorating as well as going from Parent A Child A to Parent B Child A and both being exclusive IMO should prorate.

2. Ability to download all subscription data to Excel. (I posted this to the wish list blog some time ago.)

Export functionality is planned for a future release. We actually plan to implement export/import in a generic way that'd work for any backend table view.

Despite having these wish list items, I am enormously grateful to CBSubs. I looked for a long time to find an affordable program to use to create a membership program here on our family farm. CBSubs made that possible - very affordably. We've been using CBSubs since 2012. We rely on it, and we appreciate it - very much!

Thank you very much. This absolutely means a lot to us. I'm glad we could be of help.