Before you start creating and managing subscriptions in Cornerspot, it helps to know the vocabulary the feature uses everywhere — the status lifecycle, the billing-cycle terms, and the difference between a subscription's recurring amount and the invoices it generates. This guide is your reference for all of them.
What a subscription is
A subscription is a recurring billing relationship between one of your customers (an account) and your team. It's made up of line items billed on a schedule, and it automatically generates an invoice each billing period. The subscription is the ongoing plan; the invoices are what it produces over time.
Status: where a subscription is in its lifecycle
Every subscription has a status, shown as a coloured pill on the detail page and in the Status column of the subscriptions list.
- Trialing — in a trial period before regular billing begins.
- Active — billing normally on its schedule.
- Paused — invoice generation is temporarily stopped (and can be resumed).
- Past due — a payment has lapsed; the subscription needs attention.
- Cancelled — stopped for good. This is a terminal status.
- Expired — a fixed-term subscription that reached the end of its term without auto-renewing. Also terminal.
Not every transition is allowed. An Active subscription can move to Paused, Past due, Cancelled, or Expired; Paused and Past due can return to Active (or be cancelled or expire). Cancelled and Expired are terminal — once a subscription reaches them it can't be reactivated.
The billing cycle
A few terms describe how and when a subscription bills:
- Billing frequency — how often it bills: Monthly, Quarterly, Semi-annual, or Annual. This sets the length of each billing period.
- Term (months) — how long the subscription runs. Enter a number for a fixed term that ends after that many months, or leave it blank for an open-ended subscription that keeps billing indefinitely.
- Current period — the start and end dates of the period the subscription is in right now.
- Next Invoice — the date the next invoice will be issued, at the end of the current period.
- Auto-renew at term end — when on, a fixed-term subscription keeps billing past its term instead of moving to Expired.
Recurring amount vs. invoices
It's worth keeping these two ideas separate:
- The recurring amount is what the subscription charges each period — the sum of its line items, taxes, and discounts.
- The invoices are what the subscription generates from that amount, one per billing period. Working with the invoices themselves is covered in the Invoices and Payments tutorials.
Scheduling options you'll meet later
- Auto-pay — when a customer enables it in the member portal, each invoice is charged automatically to their saved payment method. (Covered in its own tutorial.)
- Cancel at period end — schedules a subscription to cancel automatically once the current period finishes, so the customer keeps service through what they've paid for. (Also covered separately.)
Where these terms appear
The detail page's Subscription metadata card is the quickest place to read them all at once — the cadence, term, auto-renew and auto-finalize settings, the start date, and the next invoice date — alongside the status pill at the top.
With this vocabulary in hand, the rest of the Subscriptions guides — creating, editing, pausing, cancelling, and billing — will make a lot more sense.