Why You Can't Charge a Retroactive Membership (and Alternatives)

Why This Limitation Exists

Subscriptions in Zipper are powered by Stripe, which doesn’t support backdated billing — a subscription must start today or in the future. If you enter a past start date, it’s treated as “start today” without billing for the missed period.

What To Do Instead

• Start today + charge separately — Create the subscription starting today, then use the Point-of-Sale to add a one-time charge for the missed period (Point-of-Sale → select customer → add a custom charge → complete checkout).
• Issue credits manually — Start the subscription today, use Issue new Booking Credits to give the member credits for sessions already attended, and create a manual Point-of-Sale charge for the time owed.
• Start fresh — Start the subscription today and accept that the first billing period covers from today forward. Use a one-time charge or offer the past sessions as a goodwill gesture.

Tips

• Communicate proactively: Send the subscription invite the same day a member first attends to avoid this situation.
• For migrated members: During migration, subscriptions are imported with their original start dates via the import tool — this is different from manually creating a subscription in the UI.

Troubleshooting

I need to give a member partial credit for time already paid but not used. See How to Adjust and Reassign Member Credits — you can add booking credits manually to account for owed sessions.

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Need a hand?

Email our team at support@joinzipper.com and we'll usually reply within a few hours.

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