Subscription Imports

The subscriptions import tool will allow you to import new subscriptions into Advanced Billing from a CSV file. The tool does not allow you to update existing subscriptions via this method. The CSV subscription import feature is strictly for creating new subscriptions.

Subscriptions can also be imported using API. Please see subscriptions API import for more information.

If you do not feel comfortable with the procedures laid out below, please open a support ticket or contact support@maxio.com .

Feature Compatibility

Certain Advanced Billing features are not compatible with the subscription import tool at this time:

• Customer hierarchies
• Importing subscribers that utilize the WhoPays feature

Sample XLSX Files

Advanced Billing requires that you use one of the following example files to input data using the subscription import tool.

• If you have the customers’ credit card details on file (usually merchants who are new to Advanced Billing):
• Sample XLSX with Card Numbers

If your customers’ payment details are stored in the secure vault of one of our supported gateways (new and existing Advanced Billing merchants):

• Sample XLSX with Vault Tokens

If you do not have your customers’ payment details and plan on requesting them later or are subscribing them to a free product (new and existing merchants).

• Sample XLSX with No Payment Profiles

Sample CSV Files

• Sample CSV with card numbers
• Sample CSV with vault tokens
• Sample CSV with no payment profiles

Important Notices and Disclaimers

• When a subscription is imported that contains a product with a trial period, the trial period will be omitted.
• Subscription imports will either create a subscription with a subscription state of Active or Canceled depending on if the conditions for importing a canceled subscription are met.
• The activated date of the subscription will be the date that the subscription is imported. Unless you are importing a canceled subscription, you can absolutely set the “next_billing_date” to a time in the future.
• API Users: Use the subscription override endpoint to align Advanced Billing data with your existing data.
• You must disable all email notifications related to subscription creation if you do not want to alert your customers that you have created the active subscription (signup emails, receipts, statements, and billing portal invitations). For canceled subscriptions, an email will not be sent regardless of these settings.
• We recommend that you limit the number of subscriptions in each import to 100.
• We recommend that you use the tool when our technical specialist team is available to help with any issues (normally Monday-Thursday, 9a-5p Eastern).
• A billing address cannot be provided unless vault tokens or full card numbers are provided as the billing address is stored with the payment profile. If you are not importing vault tokens or full card numbers, please be sure your product settings do not require a payment method or billing address at signup. Once the import is complete, you can re-enable the required fields in your product settings so new signups must enter this information.
• Authorize.net requires the last four digits of the credit card number to process refunds. Please include the last four digits of the credit card number when importing with vault tokens only.
• CyberSource requires a billing address to process successful transactions. You will not be able to import subscriptions without a vault token or full card number for this gateway.
• When working with credit card data in Excel, long strings of digits are converted into scientific notation. Excel will always convert a long series of digits into scientific notation when you open the source data in Excel (double-clicking the file and opening it in Excel). To get around the scientific notation conversion, you have to import your CSV file into Excel and define the column of digits as text so that Excel will not convert it to scientific notation. In addition, Excel only records numbers up to 15 digits if they are not entered as text. Any additional digits are reset to 0.
  
  Cross section of good / bad credit card numbers in Excel

• We do not recommend importing multiple Subscriptions which use the same vault token.

Advanced Billing Overview

The following is a list of required fields for subscription creation via the import tool. They must be in CSV format.

Date Format

The following date formats are equivalent and will work as input to next_billing_at, activated_at, previous_billing_at, and canceled_at:

Aug 06 2030 11:34:00 -0400
Aug 06 2030 11:34 -0400
2030-08-06T11:34:00-04:00
8/6/2030 11:34:00 EDT
8/6/2030 8:34:00 PDT
2030-08-06T15:34:00Z

You may also pass just a date, in which case we will assume the time to be noon: 2030-08-06

Next Billing At

If you enter NOW for next_billing_date, your customer will be charged immediately upon import.

Setup Fee

Subscriptions that are created at a later date will not charge the initial/setup fee if created using this mechanism. If you have a product with a setup fee, you must use the value of NOW for next_billing_date in order to collect the setup fee.

Trial Period

Additionally, if there is a trial period on the purchased product, the trial period will be omitted. In the case of any missed fees, due to the omitted setup fee, use the feature to Add Charge if you wish to include any additional fees to the subscription.

Previous Billing At

The optional previous_billing_at attribute is used to help backdate existing subscriptions that are being migrated from another billing management tool. It will set the current_period_starts_at and activated_at fields on the subscription. While activated_at is a display-only field, current_period_starts_at will allow for the correct proration for ‘existing’ subscriptions.

For example, ordinarily, a subscription imported today will have their billing period set to today. By passing a previous_billing_at, it’s possible to backfill the beginning of the period. Let’s say a subscription’s period started on Jan 1 2019 and ends on Jan 1 2020. The date today is July 6 2019. previous_billing_at will set the period start date on the subscription to Jan 1 2019, rather than the default behavior of July 6 2019.

The previous_billing_at date must be before the current time and before the specified next_billing_at. We recommend putting the subscription on a product whose recurring period matches the length of the subscription’s period. See the how to format this field.

Payment Collection Method

Advanced Billing allows you the option of importing invoice-based subscriptions. The payment collection method can be specified for each individual subscription and may consist of one of the following values: “automatic,” “invoice,” or “remittance.” If no method is specified within the CSV file, Advanced Billing will use your site defaults, but no changes need to be made to the site settings in order to import a variety of payment collection methods.

Card Types

The payment_profile_card_type field is optional. If supplied, it must be one of:

• american_express
• dankort
• diners_club
• discover
• forbrugsforeningen
• jcb
• laser
• master
• maestro
• solo
• switch
• visa

Supported Vaults & Token Examples

If you are supplying vault tokens during import, you must also include the payment_profile_current_vault field. This field specifies which gateway the token belongs to, and must be one of the supported values listed below.

The table below provides example vault tokens and formatting details for each supported gateway:

In some cases, if you're importing subscriptions into a site that already uses a legacy gateway (such as “PayPal Website Payments Pro (Legacy)” or “eWAY Rapid 3.1 (Legacy)”), you may use simplified vault identifiers like paypal or eway_rapid. If you're unsure which value to use, please contact support for guidance.

Required Country Format

Advanced Billing requires that you use the ISO standard country codes when formatting the import file. Countries should be formatted as 2 characters. For more information, please see the following Wikipedia article on ISO_3166-1.

Required State Format

Advanced Billing requires that you use the ISO standard state codes when formatting the import file.

• US States (2 characters): ISO_3166-2
• States outside the US (2-3 characters): To find the correct state codes outside of the US, please go to ISO_3166-1 and click on the link in the “ISO 3166-2 codes” column next to the country you wish to populate.

Component Format

In order for the import tool to handle importing components we require the headers to be formatted in a specific way:

kind_ then component_id then the id of the component between []

Altogether it looks something like:

quantity_component_id[123]

Supported kind_’s are:

metered / quantity / on_off

The kind_, along with the component_id, can be found when viewing your list of components:

Location of component_id and kind

 

In addition to allocating to a component you can optionally pass price_point_id[] to allocate to a specific price point. As an example of how to include price point:

quantity_component_id[123]price_point_id[1]

The id for a price point can be found when editing the component itself (Catalog > Products > Component tab > click the Edit button on component)
 

If price_point_id[] isn’t passed in the header we will utilize the default price point for the component.

Required Custom Fields Format

Custom Fields need to be imported in a format: resource - customer or subscription, depending on which resource is the custom field attached to, then metafield_id, then [] with the id of the custom field inside the brackets. All together it will look like: subscription_metafield_id[1234] or customer_metafield_id[4567] Supported resources are: subscription and customer.

You can find the ID and the resource type when viewing the list of Custom Fields:

Custom Fields ID and Resource

If the custom field ID or resource will be incorrect, the subscription and/or customer will be created without the custom field that had an error.

Example Field Values

The following is an example of the fields for each column of the CSV file for a basic import of subscriptions with existing tokens using the Advanced Billing test gateway.

The system will reject all CSV files which are formatted incorrectly. The most common formatting issues related to illegal characters such as commas or foreign symbols/characters.

Import Process

1. Select "Import" from the subscriptions view.
   
2. Select "New Import".
   
3. Browse your computer for your CSV file, upload it, and click Process CSV.
   
   The CSV can take several minutes to completely process.

Troubleshooting

Sometimes, the CSV file entered is formatted incorrectly, contains invalid headers, or is empty. In these cases, an error is returned when the CSV is initially submitted. The most common error occurs for non-UTF-8 CSV files.

If you are receiving an error such as the one above, it’s likely that the CSV file was opened, edited, and saved within a spreadsheet program, such as Excel or Numbers. When using these programs, please use the “Export” functionality to export a new UTF-8 CSV each time any changes are made. Alternatively, a text editor can be used for smaller updates, as it will maintain the UTF-8 CSV format.

Once the system has determined the file is valid, errors messages will be generated if any individual subscriptions fail. In the case of the screenshot below, Angela Test’s subscription on line number one was created successfully, but the subscription on line number two failed as their product handle does not exist.

When one or more subscriptions fail, you can upload the same CSV file after making corrections. The system will ignore any subscriptions which were imported successfully. There is no need to remove those entries from the CSV file.

Please open a support ticket if you require assistance. You can also reach us via email at support@maxio.com.