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Overview

Every subscription your store creates becomes a contract — a living record of what the customer bought, what they pay, and when they are billed next. You manage contracts under Shopify Admin → circuly Rental & Subscriptions → Subscriptions. The Subscriptions area has two tabs: Subscriptions (the contracts themselves) and Your plans (the subscription plans that create them). This page covers the first.

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The subscriptions list

Across the top you get a quick read on your book of business: Active, New (last 30 days), Cancelled (last 30 days), and Paused. Below that, tabs filter the list by status — All, Active, Paused, Cancelled, Expired, Pending Return, and Dunning. You can also filter by subscription type (Rental, Digital, or Consumable) and, if you sell in more than one currency, by currency. The search box matches a contract number, a customer’s name or email, an order number, or a product title.
Bundle subscriptions are not shown here. They have their own area under Bundles → Active bundles.

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Exporting

Export downloads the contracts you have selected, or everything matching your current filters, as a CSV. Exporting requires the Base plan or higher.

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What a contract shows

Opening a contract gives you everything in one scroll:
  • Summary — product, variant, price, order, billing interval, next billing date, initial commitment, and whether it auto-renews
  • Billing cycles — every cycle with its status, amount, and expected date
  • Invoice history — when invoicing is switched on
  • Customer — name and email, linked through to Shopify
  • Asset — the physical unit assigned to this subscription, if any
  • Credit balance, Buyout, and Product swap — when those features apply

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Actions you can take

Skip or unskip a billing cycle

Skip an upcoming cycle to pause one charge without ending the subscription. You can only skip a cycle that has not been billed yet, and you can unskip it again afterwards.
You can move the next billing date only. Once a cycle has been billed, failed, or skipped — or once its date has passed — it can no longer be edited. The date picker limits you to the range Shopify accepts for that cycle.
Available for Active, Paused, and Dunning subscriptions. Choose to cancel immediately or at the end of the current billing cycle, and optionally record a reason.Cancelling only stops future billing. Orders that were already placed or fulfilled are not affected.
Brings a Paused, Dunning, Expired, or Pending Return subscription back to Active and restores any cycles that were skipped while it was inactive.
Switch the customer to a different product or variant from the same plan. Turn this on under Settings → Product swap, where you also set how many swaps are allowed per billing cycle and how long a customer must wait between them.For rentals, a swap starts a return of the current item. For consumable and digital subscriptions the line is replaced in place and billing carries on unchanged.
Lets the customer purchase the item outright. The subscription must be Active, buyout must be enabled under Settings → Buyout options, and an asset must be assigned to the contract. Starting a buyout creates a draft order for the customer to pay and pauses the subscription in the meantime.
Appears once a subscription is Pending Return — for example after a rental swap. It ends the subscription and releases the assigned unit back to your available stock.
Attach a specific serial-numbered unit to the subscription, remove one, or create a new one on the spot. See Asset tracking.
Pausing and resuming are customer actions. Your customers can pause and resume from their account; from the admin you can reactivate a paused subscription, but you cannot pause one on their behalf. See Customer portal.

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When a payment fails

Failed and overdue payments are triaged under Operations → Payments, not on the contract itself. Three views help you sort them: All overdue, Needs decision (circuly has stopped retrying and it is your call), and Retrying (still being retried automatically). From any row you can:
  • Retry payment now — attempt the charge immediately
  • Send payment-update email — Shopify emails the customer a secure link to update their card. There is no link you can copy and send yourself
  • Skip cycle or Edit billing date — move past the failed charge
  • Cancel subscription — with the same options as above
  • Open contract — jump to the full record and come straight back to your place in the queue
The retry schedule is fixed: circuly retries a failed payment up to three times before moving the subscription to Paused. This schedule is not configurable.

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Subscription statuses

Shopify has fewer statuses than circuly, so the two do not always read the same. Dunning and Pending Return both still show as Active in Shopify, and Bought out and Ended both show as Cancelled. The circuly status is the more precise one.

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Next steps

Asset tracking

Track the serial-numbered units attached to your subscriptions.

Customer portal

See what your customers can do for themselves.