Test Your Site Before Going Live

Maxio has compiled a list of helpful items to address during your testing phase. The list below goes above and beyond the act of creating products and signing up subscribers. We recommend using the outline below to supplement you as you test your Site’s functionality.

In addition to testing, this list of actionable items also serves as a list of things to consider offering to your subscribers as well as Site administrators to harness Advanced Billing’s full functionality.

Work through the objectives below. They cover the Site functionality that matters most during testing, and that you keep using once the site is live.

The list below is alphabetical rather than chronological, so work through it in whatever order suits your setup.

Billing Portal

It’s important to give your Subscribers a way to manage their subscription. In this case, we recommend enabling the Billing Portal.

• The Billing Portal can be easily enabled through the Settings tab.
• Configure which features your subscribers can reach in the Billing Portal, per the Configuring Billing Portal Options help article

Once you’ve enabled the Billing Portal, use your test subscriptions to view the Billing Portal for your Site. We recommend initiating cancelations, updating contact information, etc.

See the Understand the Billing Portal help article.

Dunning

Use Advanced Billing’s prebuilt dunning strategies to easily collect charges from subscriptions that are in the past due state.

• Advanced Billing’s automated Dunning Strategy can easily be enabled by following the instructions Configure Credit Card Dunning
• Select a Dunnuing Strategy to collect past due charges. Choose from one of our 3 pre-configured options.

Testing Notes

You can force a subscription into the past due state with a few simple steps from within your test site.

1. Delete the current payment profile for a subscription.
2. Change the next billing date on the subscription to the current timestamp.
3. Wait for the subscription to attempt renewal without a card on file. It moves into the past due state and the dunning process starts.
4. Inspect the email archives for results of the dunning emails
5. Allow additional days to pass to see the dunning process play out.

Invoices

If you are going to use the invoice payment method, we recommend generating test invoices in your sandbox account before going live. Inspect the look and feel of your invoices. Also, learn how to receive payments, and add charges to your invoices.

• Learn how to enable invoice billing in the Manage Invoices Settings help article.
• Understand how to receive invoice payments by cash, check, or credit card in the Record and Manage Invoice Payments help article.
• Learn to toggle a subscription from the automatic-based payment method to the invoice-based payment method.

Testing Notes

If your business requires that you use invoices, we recommend the following testing as much of the invoice functionality before going live:

• Create an invoice, per the Create an Ad-Hoc Invoice help article
• Receive a payment on an invoice, per the Record and Manage Invoice Payments help article
• Inspect your invoices, per the Filter, Sort, and Export Invoices help article

My Account

Before you exit the testing phase of your site, it’s important to set up every individual user of the Advanced Billing site with their own account. Each account can be given an individual set of restrictions to protect valuable information & restrict editing of products, etc.

• Learn how to Set up users for your account with restricted settings

Payment gateways

As you transition your Advanced Billing Site from test to live, see Troubleshoot Payment Gateway Configuration Issues for common issues you may encounter during the changeover.

Products

By this point you know the basics of products. The articles below cover the ground between a working setup and a well-configured one, and are worth reading before you take the site live.

• Learn about product price points. Advanced Billing allows you to create multiple price points for a single product. Each price point can have different pricing and frequencies. Subscriptions can then be moved between price points.
• Learn to organize your products by Product Family. Create groups of products so that you and your staff stay organized when working with the application. We recommend segmenting your product offering into clear and concisely labeled Product Familys for the benefit of all.