Upgrades/Renewals

I will run it by my boss and see if he's okay with people skipping a year's payment if they register in November-December.

It sounds like what you're actually wanting is renewing into a new plan, but such functionality doesn't exist. When you upgrade to a plan it's completely replacing the old one with a new plan.

I will run it by my boss and see if he's okay with people skipping a year's payment if they register in November-December.

I don't think I'd word it like that, lol. They're skipping 1 months worth of value. It benefits the customer more than anything as they don't feel cheated by paying 12mos for only 1mo of service. Would you be happy with such a purchase? Personally I'd issue a charge back and never come back, lol.

Well I guess in our industry, they could in theory reap the benefits of an entire year in only a few short weeks. For example, someone pays for an entire year in January and applies to get a $10,000 research grant from us and gets it before the end of the year vs. someone registering in November, gets a $20,000 grant for example and they never paid dues for that year at all. We always charged people for a full year if they needed something from us at the end of that year.

You may want to consider using 1 year durations in that case instead of by calendar year durations. As with by calendar year durations if they subscribed at the beginning of December and it ends in December their subscription will expire at the end of the month. The only way to avoid that is to use the parameter described above, which will subscribe them for next year and give them December free. However, your usage doesn't sound like a typical subscribe for a service so I'm not sure what to suggest.

The reason why we don't do calendar years is because we have this big conference early in the year and it helps us manage who can attend (members only) when we have everyone needing to renew end of the year/early the following year.

The way I have been getting around it so far is by forcing people to call in if they want to change to a different plan and I do it from the backend. The only issue with that is that the payment process doesn't go through CBSubs then. It's all manual.