Manage billing cycle contracts

Billing cycle contracts inherit the contract lines, pricing policy, and delivery policy from the billing cycle's source subscription contract. However, you might want to edit the contract information on a billing cycle when you need to make a temporary change to a customer's subscription contract. For example, you might remove a product that's out of stock and replace it with a similar product for a single billing cycle.

This tutorial shows you how to edit the contract information on a billing cycle.

What you'll learn

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In this tutorial, you'll learn how to do the following tasks:

Retrieve a draft of the most up-to-date contract information for a subscription billing cycle
Remove a line item from the contract draft
Add a line item to the contract draft
Commit the edited contract information
Fetch the edited contract information on a subscription billing cycle
Create an order for a subscription billing cycle

Requirements

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Your app can make authenticated requests to the GraphQL Admin API.
Your app has the read_own_subscription_contracts and write_own_subscription_contracts access scopes. Learn how to configure your access scopes using Shopify CLI.
You've created products and product variants in your development store.
You've created an active subscription contract with a recurring billing and delivery policy.
You've familiarized yourself with the concept of billing cycles.

Step 1: Create a subscription draft

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You can use the subscriptionBillingCycleContractEdit mutation to create a subscription draft with the most up-to-date contract information on a specified billing cycle. Pass the contract ID and either the index or a date belonging to the billing cycle to specify the billing cycle.

Make note of the subscription contract draft ID and line ID in the response. You'll use it to update the draft data in the next step.

Step 2: Update the subscription draft

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After retrieving the draft ID, you can begin making edits to the contract draft. Edits to the contract draft can be made incrementally. Changes to the contract draft aren't made live until the draft is committed.

Remove a line item

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You can pass the draft ID and line ID to the subscriptionDraftLineRemove mutation to remove a line item from the subscription draft:

Add a line item

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You can pass the draft ID and line information to the subscriptionDraftLineAdd mutation to add a line item to the subscription draft:

Step 3: Commit the subscription draft

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When you commit the subscription draft, the changes that you've made become active on the billing cycle for which the draft was created. You can call the subscriptionDraft query to review the information on the subscription draft before committing it.

After you're satisfied with your updates, you can call the subscriptionBillingCycleContractDraftCommit mutation to commit your changes to the billing cycle:

Step 4: Fetch the edited contract

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After committing the subscription draft, you might want to fetch the information on your edited contract. You can do so using subscriptionBillingCycle query.

Step 5: Create an order

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When the billing date comes, you can use subscriptionBillingCycleCharge mutation to create an order. This mutation only allows a single successfull charge per billing cycle and only allows charging billing cycles with the billing attempt expected date in the past or within the next 24 hours. To use the subscriptionBillingCycleCharge mutation, you need to specify the following inputs:

subscriptionContractId: The ID of the subscription contract.
billingCycleSelector: The billing cycle you want to charge. You can select the billing cycle by passing a date or a billing cycle index.

Billing attempts are processed asynchronously, which means the resulting order won't be available right away. You can fetch the billing attempt and inspect the ready field to find out whether the order has been created (true) or not (false).

Next steps

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Learn how to bulk charge multiple contracts at the same time.