CBSubs - Paying for past years?

Hello, I have a bit of a conundrum that I'm looking to address. I'm admittedly new to CBSubs so I don't know how historical data is tracked, if this is possible.

I've been working on a site where members can eventually become lifetime members, after 15 years of dues-paying membership. The organization is forgiving if there is a lapse in membership, as long as those years are paid retro-actively. I'll give an example:

John Smith joined in 2009. He paid each year from 2009 to 2013, but then expired. In 2016, he renewed and paid again. The organization will allow him to pay for 2014 and 2015 despite it being 2016.

How would we accept/collect payment and add these yearly subscriptions to history?

You can filter within CBSubs > Payments to see if a specific user has paid 15 times for a plan. You can also use CBSubs Fields to increment an integer field on each payment. This would allow you to keep track of how many times they've paid directly on their profile, can be filtered in CB > User Management, and can be filtered in a userlist. Additionally that field usage could be combined with CB Auto Actions and possibly automate the entire process (automatically give them lifetime plan once that field has incremented to 15). For CB Auto Actions automation you'd use the below with a CB Paid Subscriptions action.

Plan Active
Global
Triggers: onCPayUserStateChange
User: Automatic
Access: Everybody
Conditions
1: [var3] Equal To PLAN_ID_HERE
2: [var2] Equal To A
3. [cb_subcount] Greater Than or Equal To 15

Since it's a field though I suppose you could also just do this on login and only need to condition against the integer field (e.g. cb_subcount).

Thank you for the excellent response - that's actually addressing what would have been my next question, auto-upgrading.

What I was meaning to ask here was, how would someone pay for a previous year's membership? To continue with my example, how would John Smith be able to pay for 2014 and 2015?

To force them to pay for past years you need to set "Manual renewal extends expiration date as follows" to "Renewal extends expiration date (without gap or overlap)" under the Pricing tab of your plan. This means their renewal starts when they last expired causing them to pay for skipped years, but honestly it likely won't go over well with your users. With the increment field it won't matter as it only will count active renewals so if they skip a year they simply don't increment for that year.

krileon wrote: To force them to pay for past years you need to set "Manual renewal extends expiration date as follows" to "Renewal extends expiration date (without gap or overlap)" under the Pricing tab of your plan. This means their renewal starts when they last expired causing them to pay for skipped years, but honestly it likely won't go over well with your users. With the increment field it won't matter as it only will count active renewals so if they skip a year they simply don't increment for that year.

Thanks for your suggestion. I realize it's a weird setup, but that's how it operates. They want to count past years and accept payment for them to "catch up" rather than not counting a year if they weren't an active member. That may work, as long as the users understand it must be continuous, but they may allow both and obviously the config can only be one way or the other.

I'll explain that these are the options and we can't have it both ways. Is there a way to manually add a payment & past year as an admin? Could we have members pay offline/by phone and add the entry in the back end?

I'll explain that these are the options and we can't have it both ways. Is there a way to manually add a payment & past year as an admin?

Not unless you go through the payment process on frontend on their behalf to generate a basket then pay that basket in backend but that'll be treated as just a regular renewal.

Could we have members pay offline/by phone and add the entry in the back end?

Yes, that's the purpose of the offline payment gateway. Either you or them will still need to generate the basket on frontend though.