---
title: Collect payment in installments with Subscription Schedules
slug: collect-payment-in-installments-with-subscription-schedules
published_at: 2022-11-02 15:00:04 +0000
updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:51:59 +0000
summary: 
description: In this episode, you'll learn how to use Subscription Schedules to collect a large payment over several months in installments. We'll start the Subscription with Stripe Checkout, then create a Subscription Schedule from that new Subscription assigning phases for the incremental payments, and ultimately canceling the Subscription after the final payment. We'll also show how to use Test Clocks to simulate moving through time and to test your integration.   ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev  ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 01:00 Create a subscription in Checkout 05:24 Build subscription phases and apply to schedule 12:15 Testing collecting installments with test clocks 16:50 Cancel subscription after final installment 19:30 conclusion   ### Resources Subscription Schedules https://stripe.com/docs/api/subscription_schedules  Subscription Schedule use-cases https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/subscription-schedules/use-cases#installment-plans    ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat   ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest  ### Feedback
tags: [stripe, payments, ecommerce, stripedev, Collect payment in installments with Subscription Schedules, @cjav_dev, installments with subscription schedules, setting up subscription schedules with Stripe Checkout, Scheduling subscription changes with Stripe Checkout, Stripe Checkout Subscriptions]
views: 859
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/collect-payment-in-installments-with-subscription-schedules
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z8mncrjq24
youtube_id: 7z8mncrjq24
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/7z8mncrjq24
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/7z8mncrjq24/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Collect payment in installments with Subscription Schedules

*Published: November 02, 2022*
*Views: 859*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z8mncrjq24)

[![Collect payment in installments with Subscription Schedules](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/7z8mncrjq24/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z8mncrjq24)

## Description

In this episode, you'll learn how to use Subscription Schedules to collect a large payment over several months in installments. We'll start the Subscription with Stripe Checkout, then create a Subscription Schedule from that new Subscription assigning phases for the incremental payments, and ultimately canceling the Subscription after the final payment. We'll also show how to use Test Clocks to simulate moving through time and to test your integration.


### Presenter
CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev

### Table of contents
00:00 Introduction
01:00 Create a subscription in Checkout
05:24 Build subscription phases and apply to schedule
12:15 Testing collecting installments with test clocks
16:50 Cancel subscription after final installment
19:30 conclusion


### Resources
Subscription Schedules https://stripe.com/docs/api/subscription_schedules 
Subscription Schedule use-cases https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/subscription-schedules/use-cases#installment-plans 


### Support
If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat
 
### Updates
Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest

### Feedback

## Transcript

for Big Ticket items or depending on your business you might want to offer installment plans where your customers can pay you sort of over the course of several different months now out of the box stripe has official support for some buy now pay later payment method types like a firm klarna after pay clear pay but in today's episode we're going to implement our own installment plans using an advanced feature of subscriptions called subscription schedules so we're going to start a subscription with stripe checkout we're going to attach a schedule to it so that we can apply several different phases where we will collect installments over time and ultimately cancel the subscription after we've collected the right number of payments [Music] in order to implement our installment plan we're going to collect an upfront amount of 300 and then we're going to collect a 100 a month fee for three months so it'll be a total of six hundred dollars and we're gonna have 300 up front and then 100 a month after that over time something that we need to do first is head over to our products section and create a brand new product we're going to call this installment plan and this description is really important for our installment plans because when we're using stripe checkout this will be the way that we're going to communicate to customers that this is going to be 300 up front and then it's going to be 100 a month for three months there isn't a default built-in way to apply a subscription schedule inside of checkout so that the customer sees all of the different phases so instead what we're going to do is collect that upfront payment and then after they have subscribed we'll modify the subscription by attaching it to a schedule and building out our installments so let's it's we're going to keep this description as is now let's build out our prices so our upfront price is going to be three hundred dollars that's going to be recurring we want that to still be recurring and monthly so that we can start a subscription next we're going to add another price and this is going to be 100 again we're using standard pricing recurring monthly we'll save our product and We're Off to the Races now these are the two prices that we need to use inside of our server in order to collect payment we're going to use this first 300 a month price in order to start our subscription with stripe checkup all right from the terminal I'm going to use the stripe CLI you can use the stripe CLI uh in a lot of different environments I've installed it with Homebrew here on a Mac device but you can install it in most environments I'm going to say stripe samples create check out single subscription this is going to install our subscription example and we're going to use the node environment on the server today so after we have run that we can CD into checkout single subscription one nice thing about the stripe CLI is that once we're authenticated it will automatically set our API keys in the dot end so this has pre-populated a primary key and a secret key that we can use it's also got the web hook signing secret now for this specific example it's expecting a price ID for basic and a price ID for pro we're not actually going to use these at all instead we're going to do is hard code a price directly into server.js this sample also comes with some HTML and JavaScript just to render out the front end for a couple different buttons that we can use when we're going through the process what we want to do is jump into our server and this is where we're going to make some changes so this example includes a route that accepts post requests to slash create checkout session Now by default it's going to receive the price ID from the front end using the request body but we're going to instead again we're just going to hard code this ID for our example today the price that we want to use is this 300 a month price that's going to be sort of our setup price okay and at this point we're going to create a checkout session and redirect the customer to the checkout sessions URL and then inside of the web hook Handler in a moment we're going to actually like attach to a schedule and work through that process so let's open up a new tab here we're going to jump into the server directory and run npm install that's going to install our dependencies now we could say npm start that would start our server what I'm going to do instead is use nodemon for server.js so that we don't have to keep restarting the server and that's going to fire up our server for us so if we head over to localhost4242 we will see this example so these two buttons are not going to actually use starter or professional again we didn't set those Pro or basic IDs instead either of these buttons is going to just redirect us and show the 300 a month price here you can tell why it's important to put that description in because here we're explaining that we're charging 300 up front and then 100 a month for three months I have used a link here but customers will be presented lots of different payment methods that they could enter to start their subscription So today we're going to use this 4242 card to click subscribe and this is going to start a brand new subscription at this point we're still just charging 300 a month it's going to start a subscription that's going to run forever and collect 300 a month each month so if we were to grab this customer ID and jump over to the dashboard we're going to see that this customer is going to be charged 300 a month without any end date okay so this customer is now on this installment plan their next invoice is for 300 they already paid an invoice for 300 so at this point we're just collecting the setup fee and now what we need to do is as soon as the subscription is created and that checkout session is successful we're going to create a schedule from this new subscription and use that to apply our installment plan so the way this works is inside of the server we have a route called slash webhook this is handling web hook event notifications from stripe we have lots of different videos and documentation about how to set up your web hook Handler and it explains all of these lines here at the top about how we're going to receive the post request notification from stripe and then at the bottom we have some handling that allows us to determine what we want to do when events fire on our stripe account now typically you need to have a public facing URL in order to build and integrate a web hook endpoint one way you could do that is using a tool like ngrok but what we're going to do today is use the stripe CLI again and it has this special sub command called listen which we can use to forward to localhost 4242 webhook now that is going to form a direct connection between our stripe account and our local running machine and so when events happen on our stripe account they're going to be delivered to this localhost 4242 event and we'll also see some of those event notifications log out to the console here okay so now what we want to do is in the case of a checkout session completed event we want to create a schedule from the subscription that was related to this so we're going to create a new checkout session object here from data.object and we're going to create a new schedule from stripe dot subscription schedules dot create and we can pass in from subscription and pass it an ID of a subscription it just so happens that this checkout session object that we just created has reference to the new subscription it has the ID of the new subscription so this is what we need to pass down we're going to create the schedule from the subscription a subscription schedule object has many phases so let's go look at the API reference for subscription schedules so here we can look at the schedule object and we'll see that kind of like the the shape of an object and what it looks like the important thing here is that we're going to talk about phases so the phases are each of the different ways the subscription will change over time as the schedule advances and so in the very first phase when we create a schedule from a subscription it only has one phase and that phase consists of the data from the existing subscription so it has all of the information about that existing subscriptions current phase the things that are really important on this phase is the start date the end date and any line items so anytime we want to update a schedule we need to pass in all of those arguments so we're going to pass in the items we're also going to pass in the start date and end date of the subscription we're going to head back to the server and we're going to update our schedule first we'll console.log that a new schedule is created here we'll just say like schedule created and we'll put in the ID of the schedule next what we want to do is update the schedule so we're going to say schedule is stripe.subscription schedules dot update the first argument is the ID of the schedule the second argument is a big options block we're going to pass in all the information that is going to update the schedule so the first is that we want to include some phases now we also want to Define an end behavior so an end behavior is what should happen after we finish all of the phases now in the default case the end behavior is that we will release the schedule meaning that the subscription will continue to live on using the final phase of the list of phases so in our case because we're trying to create an installment plan that's going to have a specific end date we want the end behavior to be canceled so that after the subscription schedule finishes its last phase it cancels the subscription and stops collecting any further payments now we also want to pass in some phases that's going to be the first phase will be the existing phase from the current subscription that was just created inside of checkout the second phase is going to be our brand new phase that's going to modify the subscription so that it only collects 100 a month for three months so the way that we say that we want to collect 100 a month is we say we're going to pass in a list of items and that list of items is going to have a price and a quantity of one the price here is going to be our price ID from the product that we just created this is going to be the idea of the 100 a month price for the product that we just created so we're going to enter that in another thing that's important that's part of the phase is we want to set the number of iterations so we can set the number of iterations in our case to 3 because we want to collect one hundred dollars three times at the end of this Final Phase we should be canceling the subscription now this spread operation for phases now we don't actually have a variable called phases yet so we need to construct phases from our existing schedule so our existing schedule already has a single phase that phase we want to pull off the start date the end date and the items from the existing phase and we don't need to map over or modify any of the items those can live on as they stand let's also console.log our new phases and we'll also console.log our schedule our new schedule okay we have our listener set up to forward events to our local web hook endpoint we've got our endpoint set up let's go through the process one more time we're going to say restart the demo go through checkout and now when we subscribe we should modify our underlying subscription so that it is attached to a schedule that schedule is going to have an explicit end date it's also going to have a set number of iterations let's grab our customer ID jump over to the dashboard and take a look at what this customer looks like so they are on this installment plan that's great now you can see that the next invoice is set for 100 on September 30 and we can see that the subscription is going to end on December 30. so that's all looking great if we scroll down we can see that we are we already collected 300 for the first payment and that the next payment is going to be again this 100 payment for the next phase this is awesome and it allows us to kind of like go through the process but you might be wondering how can I confirm this is actually going to work as expected so there's a really helpful tool this is kind of like a bonus section there's a really helpful tool that we can use to experiment and modify the timelines for our objects so we can sort of time travel and that's called a test clock so let's jump back into our code here now before we actually go through checkout what we want to do is pass in a customer object that is attached to this thing called a test clock and we can advance the test clock through time to see what kind of changes happen to that object over time so here what we want to do is we're going to create a new customer object so I say customer is a weight strive to customers.create that'll make an API called describe to create a customer now when we create that customer we want to attach it to a test clock so before we even create the customer we want to create a test clock and this is going to be something similar strive.test helpers.testclocks.create and this expects a an argument called Frozen Time and Frozen time is going to be a new date dot get time and that's going to give us something that we need to divide by a thousand to get a Unix timestamp all right so we're freezing time at time.now essentially now this test clock is going to be something that we want to pass as an argument when we create the customers we're going to say test clock is test clock.id and that should create our customer object attached to the test clock now this test clock thing is an object that we can advance through time to simulate what events are going to fire on the object so now now that we have this customer we can use this as an argument to create our checkout session so that every time a new subscription is created it is attached to this existing customer which is attached to the test clock so on and so forth Frozen time needs to be an integer so we're going to say parse parseint of this thing okay so now let's go through our flow we're going to click on select we're brought to the checkout page we can click on subscribe now we can grab our customer ID and take a look in the dashboard so we're going to search for that customer and now we can see that this customer is in a clock object simulation that's pretty cool so now if we drill into the object here we can say we want to advance time to see what's going to happen so right now it's at August 31st 2022 I'm recording at a nice and early 8 46 a.m and we're going to say that we want to advance time so we can click on this object and say let's go one month forward and we can go up to two months or up to two iterations of the billing cycle forward so this will technically allow us to go all the way to October 31st so let's actually go all the way to October 31st and click Advance now as this clock is advancing if we were to look at the output for our listener we'll see that our a lot of events are firing that's because as the object is advancing through time there are several different web hook event notifications that are going to fire on your account you'll want to make sure that you're sort of handling all of those different scenarios that is also one of the reasons why it does take a bit of time for this to advance all right now we can see that the clock's time is October 31st at 8 46 a.m so we Advanced from August 31st to October 31st and if we were to scroll down here we'll see that we did collect the 300 already then we also collected a 100 installment and in one day we have a an upcoming invoice that's going to collect another 100 so let's Advance one more time in this case we can advance all the way to December 31st December 31st at 7 46 am so we are going to advance to December 31st but recall that our installment plan ends December 30th so this is going to say that this is going to cancel on December 30th so the clock is continuing to advance all right the clock time is now December 30th at 7 46 a.m and we can see that the installment plan is canceled we're no longer going to collect any more payments so if we scroll down we can see that we collected 300 up front then 100 then 100 and then 96.77 oh no okay we were supposed to collect 100 at the end so this is a great example of why you want to go through and test with the simulation so you can ensure that your phases are configured as expected so this is actually because the default brokeration behavior is to create a proration but what we want is for it to not apply any prorations because we want our full six hundred dollars so let's go back into the server code and in our second phase where we are creating the second phase here we're going to say proration Behavior is none we don't want to create any prorations now if the proration behavior is set to none that means that this last iteration if there is a final invoice and it's a partial invoice then no invoice will be created because it does not want to collect a prorated invoice so what we want to do is even if we only want to collect 300 more dollars we're going to change this to four so that we don't prorate that last little bit okay so this is going to collect 300 up front and then three installments of exactly 100 because we're setting proration to not prorate that is not going to create an invoice for the final month all right let's go ahead and take this first bin so we're going to restart our demo click on select and once we subscribe again it's going to create a subscription schedule from this new subscription we should get a new customer ID that we can go take a look at in the dashboard we'll jump over to the dashboard and look at that customer now it's updated so that it will end on January 30th first we'll Advance time to October 31st then we will again Advance time to the end of when we expect to take the last payment which is December 30th all right we will again Advance time this time we're going to go uh to December 31st and by December 31st we should have fully collected all of the payments that we need to collect so we need to adjust the time ever so slightly there and we'll take a look at what happens after that all right now we are at December 31st you can see that the subscription will cancel on January 30th but now we can see that there are going to be no further invoices collected so if we scroll down we can see now that we collected our 300 up front then three 100 payments after that and we are done collecting payment from the customer we have collected our 600 for our big ticket item and we are ready to move on now the subscription is technically still active and that's fine because it will automatically cancel on January 30th without taking any payment again that's because we are setting that proration to none so we could test this and we could even move all the way to perhaps February 28th or something and experiment and see that this will only collect that first three 100 installments all right so our clock has advanced to February 28th of 2023 and if we scroll down we can see that we did only collect 300 up front and then 300 over three months and we can see that the subscription is canceled we will no longer collect any more payments so that is how you set up an installment plan using subscription schedules again we use stripe checkout but you can technically start a subscription schedule and use the payment element to confirm the start of that subscription hopefully this was useful thanks so much for watching and we will see you in the next one [Music]

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