Tips and Tricks #21: How to schedule tasks in Zoho Subscriptions using Custom Schedulers

Custom Schedulers is one of our newest features, which helps you save time by scheduling frequently performed tasks. In this week's post, we'll be taking a look at how you can set up custom schedulers to address niche use-cases for your subscription business.

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1. Schedule crucial sales reports to stay informed about your business' health

Reports like Lost Opportunities, Churned Subscriptions and Under Risk provide actionable insights about your sales. They can help your sales team proactively follow up with customers on crucial events like errors while signing up, subscription payments that are overdue and subscriptions that have been cancelled. 

Accessing this information on time can be vital--that's where custom schedulers come in handy. With custom schedulers, you can schedule a summary of these reports to be sent directly to your email, which will allow you to make informed decisions about your business' sales.

Apart from the reports mentioned above, the custom scheduler that you're about to create will also include the number of trial subscriptions that are about to expire in the next seven days.

The script for this custom scheduler has already been written and works thanks to Zoho Subscriptions' powerful APIs. All you have to do is configure the scheduler with the script, which we've made available on Github. Here's how to set it up:

• Go to Settings > Automation > Custom Schedulers.
  
• Click + New Custom Scheduler.
  

• Set the Frequency as Daily (or Weekly, based on your needs) and the Start Date as your current date.
  
• Copy the script for the custom function from Github and paste it in the Deluge script editor.
  
• Make sure to edit the script with your Auth Token as well as any other changes that you'd like. 
  
• Click Save.

Now, the scheduler will automatically send a summary of these reports along with a link to the full report to your email address.

2. Schedule a subscription to get cancelled on a particular date

Zoho Subscriptions lets you cancel your customers' subscriptions immediately or at the end of the current cycle. However, there may be cases where you or your customers want a subscription to be cancelled on a particular date in the future. This custom function will let you handle such cases.

How It Works

To achieve this, we'll be using custom schedulers. First, you'd have to create a custom field that can store a custom cancellation date in your subscriptions. Next, a custom scheduler, which runs daily, will go through subscriptions that have custom cancellation dates. If the scheduler finds a custom cancellation date that matches the current date, it will cancel the subscription.

End result? You'll be able to cancel a subscription simply by updating it with a cancellation date and let the custom scheduler do the rest.

Setting It Up

There may be a lot of steps involved with this one, but the setup is fairly simple and shouldn't take you more than 5-10 minutes.

To start things off, create a custom field that can store a date in your subscriptions.

• Go to Settings > Preferences > Invoice.
  
• Navigate to the Custom Field tab and click + New Custom Field.
  

• Enter the Label Name as "Custom Cancellation Date".
  
• Select the Data Type as Date.
  
• Ensure that you leave the Default Value field empty.
  
• Click Save.
  

When you want to cancel a subscription at a future date, update the custom field. Here's how: 

• Go to the Subscriptions module from the left sidebar and select the subscription that you want to cancel.
  
• Click the More dropdown and select the Update Custom Fields option.
  

• Set the subscription's cancellation date in the custom field that you created earlier. 
  
• Click Save
  

You can also customize the columns in the default subscription list view to make it easier to view cancellation dates. In the Subscriptions module, click the Column Customization icon and mark the custom field for cancellation dates. Click Save to show the cancellation date in the default subscription list view.

Our custom scheduler will also need a Custom View, which will help it sort through subscriptions with cancellation dates. To create the custom view: 

• Go to the Subscriptions module and click the View Filters dropdown. 
  
• Click + New Custom View. 
  

• Enter a Name for the custom view. 
  
• Add a criterion with the Field as your cancellation date's custom field, the Comparator as is and the Value as This Month.
  

• Click Save.
  

Now, it's time to wrap things up and finally create our custom scheduler. 

• Go to Settings > Automation > Custom Schedulers.
  
• Click + New Custom Scheduler.
  

• Set the Frequency as Daily and the Start Date as your current date.
  
• Copy the script for the custom function from Github and paste it in the Deluge script editor.
  
• Edit the script to suit your needs and also make sure to copy and paste the previously created script's customview_id parameter. 
  

(You can find the customview_id parameter by going to your custom view and copying it from your browser's URL bar.) 

• Click Save.
  

You're all set! Now, the scheduler will automatically cancel subscriptions whenever it finds a subscription that has a cancellation date in the custom field that you created.

Note: Zoho Subscriptions will not charge your customer for their pro-rated usage. So, if you want to charge your customer for their usage until the cancellation date, you can do it by adding an additional charge to their subscription before it gets cancelled.

We hope you try this out and let us know how it goes in the comments below. We're always open to suggestions, so let us know if you have a specific business scenario that you'd like to see us tackle in our weekly tips and tricks. Until next time!

Cheers,

Varun Steven

The Zoho Subscriptions Team

• Topic Participants

• Varun Steven

• Jackson Baker

• Holly Furlong

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