One of our customers had a special requirement for his Subscription Box Business. He runs a Pet Food subscription box business where the food items are shipped to customers periodically.

Customers subscribe to a box of their choice online. Once they subscribe, he has a set of prerequisites that his customers must meet. For example, he cross-checks with customers for their preferred food ingredients, validates their delivery address, checks his inventory to see if the stock is available, etc. This usually takes a day or two. After he completes the cross-checking, he approves that subscription. Next, he bills his customer periodically from the approved date instead of the date on which his customer subscribed.

To understand this scenario better, let's consider that a customer subscribed to a box on January 1. After the merchant cross-checks, the subscription is approved on January 4. Rather than billing the customer on the 1st of every month, the customer will be billed on the 4th, say February 4, March 4 and so on.

Although the subscription will be in live status in Zoho Subscriptions (with the payment collected upfront from the customers), he needs an Approval Workflow to address the mentioned business scenario. Now, let's look into how we can implement in Zoho Subscriptions.

We addressed these requirements by writing a code for the custom button. You can view the code in GitHub. By configuring this, he was able to change the Approval Status and also the renewal date in a single click.

To configure the custom field:

      1.  Go to Settings > Preferences > Invoices.

      2. Create a custom field with the name as Approval Status and type as Dropdown.

      3. Type the options as Awaiting Approval and Approved and select the Default Value as Awaiting Approval.

      4. Click Save.

To setup the custom button:

      1. Go to Settings > Preferences > Subscriptions.

      2. Create a new custom button.

      4. Copy and paste the code from GitHub. Modify it as per your requirements.

      5. Click Save and you are good to go.

Now, you'll find the custom button in the subscriptions details page.