Thinkific Payments: Manage Student Payments

With TCommerce, powered by Thinkific Payments, you can view and manage student payments directly from your Admin Dashboard! Streamline

About This Feature

We know that generating sales is a crucial aspect of growing your business. We also know that time spent on payments is time not spent teaching. That’s why TCommerce, powered by Thinkific Payments, allows you to manage your student subscriptions directly from Thinkific. This way, you can sell more products and spend less time doing it!

Improve your productivity by having all your course creation, payment management, and selling tools conveniently located in one central platform. This integrated approach simplifies your workflow and saves you valuable time.

How It Works

TCommerce: Powered by Thinkific Payments, allows you to accept payment from students through Thinkific's Built-in Checkout without having to connect with a third-party payment provider. With TCommerce, all you need is a Thinkific account and a bank account to start selling your products.

To access many powerful features on TCommerce that help you save time and sell more, enable Thinkific Payments on your account: Thinkific Payments.

Once you've set up your Thinkific Payments account and set your product pricing, you can start managing new student payments directly from your Admin Dashboard.

You can take the following student subscription management actions directly from Thinkific:

Extend a free trial
Adjust subscription billing date
Pause student subscriptions and payment plans
Resume student subscriptions and payment plans
Cancel student subscriptions or payment plans
View and retry failed student payments
Refund student payments

Where to Manage Student Payments

Recurring student payments for subscriptions and payment plans can be viewed in the Orders Report and Transactions Report, and the Users Table of your Admin Dashboard.

View and Manage Individual Student Payments

To review an individual student's payments for subscriptions and payment plans:

From your Admin Dashboard, select Users
Select All Users
In the Users table click on a student's Full Name to view their profile
Select the Payments tab

The Payments tab will only appear in a user's profile if they have purchased a subscription or payment plan using Thinkific Payments.

Once you navigate to the Payments tab in your student's profile, you will see all of their subscription and payment plans that were purchased through Thinkific Payments:

This table shows:

Product - The name of the purchased product
Status - The payment status of the subscription or payment plan (see below for more information). This field also indicates when the next payment will be made
Price - The price of the subscription or payment plan. If you have set up a custom first payment for subscription pricing, this value will also appear in the Price column
Last payment - The date and time (in your timezone) of the most recent payment for a subscription or payment plan
Created - The date and time (in your timezone) the subscription or payment plan was purchased
Paused on - The date and time (in your timezone) a subscription or payment plan was paused

Subscriptions and payment plans can have the following statuses:

Active - Recurring payments are ongoing, the student is up-to-date on payments and has access to the product
Canceled - Recurring payments have been canceled, and the student does not have access to the product. This status is displayed when either the student or creator cancels the recurring payments (see below for more information)
Past due - A payment for a subscription or payment plan failed. The student does not have access to the product (see below for more information).
Closed - This status is for payment plans only and is displayed when all payments have been made. The student will have access to the product until the enrollment expiry date.

From the Payments tab of your Users section, you can take a variety of additional actions to assist your students, including:

Extend a free trial
Adjust subscription billing date
Pause student subscriptions and payment plans
Resume student subscriptions and payment plans
Cancel student subscriptions or payment plans
View and retry failed student payments
Refund student payments

View and Manage Multiple Student Payments

You can find and review orders and transactions of multiple students in the Orders Report and Transaction Report.

Orders Report

The Order Report displays all of your students' orders made through Thinkific's Built-in Checkout - including orders processed through Thinkific Payments, Stripe, and Paypal. You can see which payment processor was used for each Order under the Provider column.

Once you've set up Thinkific Payments for your Thinkific site, this table will also include orders for free products.

To access the Orders report:

From your Admin Dashboard, select Sales
Select Orders

The Orders report allows you to:

View orders data
Export orders and transaction data
Refund orders made through Thinkific Payments
View refunds associated with orders

Learn more here: Orders Report.

Transactions Report

The TCommerce Transaction Report makes tracking successful payments, failed payments, refunds and chargebacks a breeze. It provides an easy way to view and manage Thinkific Payments transactions separate from the Orders Report and offers enriched data of students' purchases to help track your tax liability. You can quickly find what you’re looking for and manage admin tasks like refunds from a single place.

Transaction report includes only payments made through Thinkific Payments.

To access the Transactions report:

From your Admin Dashboard, select Sales
Select Transactions

The Orders report allows you to:

View transaction data
Export transaction data
See failed payments, refunds and chargebacks
See the detailed fee and tax breakdown
Refund orders made through Thinkific Payments
View receipts associated with each transaction

Learn more here: TCommerce: Transaction Report.

Extend Free Trial

If your subscription includes a free trial and you would like to extend the free trial length for a student, you can do it directly in the Users table.

To extend free trials for subscriptions processed through Thinkific Payments:

From your Admin Dashboard, select Users
Select All Users
In the Users table, click on a student's Full Name to view their profile
Select the Payments tab
Click on the three dots. This button will only show for students with Active or Past due statuses
Click on Update free trial date
Select the new trial date
Click Update

The date that the student's subscription is set to renew will be updated in the payments tab. Your student will receive an email notification about the change.

Note that it is not possible to shorten the trial duration (i.e. to change the free trial expiry date to an earlier date).

Notifications Extend Trial - June 25.jpg

Adjust Subscription Billing Date

Sometimes, you need to change the billing day for your student's subscription or payment plan, for example, you want to align with a specific calendar date. Thinkific Payments makes it easy to do that directly in the Users table.

To adjust subscription billing date for subscriptions processed through Thinkific Payments:

From your Admin Dashboard, select Users
Select All Users
In the Users table, click on a student's Full Name to view their profile
Select the Payments tab
Click on the three dots. This button will only show for students with Active or Past due statuses
Click on Update payment date
Select the new subscription payment date
Click Update

The date that the student's subscription is set to renew will be updated in the payments tab. Your student will receive an email notification about the change.

Notification Adjusting Billing Date - June 25.jpg

The payment will not be prorated. This means that the student will be charged the same amount they were supposed to be charged, but on the new date.

Note that you can only change the subscription billing date to a date after the original billing date.

Pause Subscription and Payment Plan

There may be times when you need the ability to pause an individual student's subscription or payment plan: whether your student is going on vacation or has other circumstances that require them to take a break from your product, life happens.

With Thinkific Payments, you can pause your students' subscriptions or payment plans. This means your student will not need to pay the recurring subscription or payment plan fee while it is paused, and depending on the type of pause you choose, the billing will resume when they are ready (either automatically or manually by you).

You can easily pause student payments from the Users table. When you pause or resume a student's subscription or payment plan, an automated email is sent to both you and your student to notify them about the change in status. The email includes the corresponding student's name, the product being paused or resumed, as well as its price. Your email will include a link to the payment screen, and your student's email will include a prompt to contact your support email if further help is needed.

There are two types of pauses you can select from when pausing a student's subscription or payment plan: indefinite pause or pause until a specified date.

Pausing Indefinitely

When you pause a student's subscription or payment plan indefinitely, the billing for that student will be on hold until you manually resume the subscription or payment plan. Pausing a subscription or payment plan indefinitely does not change the existing billing date. When paused, the student will retain access to the product until the end of their current billing cycle. When you resume a student's subscription, payments will resume at the next billing cycle.

When pausing a plan indefinitely, keep in mind that you will need to manually resume the billing period when you are ready.

To indefinitely pause a subscription or a payment plan processed through Thinkific Payments:

From your Admin Dashboard, select Users
Select All Users
In the Users table, click on a student's Full Name to view their profile
Select the Payments tab
Click on the three dots. This button will only show for students with Active or Past due statuses
Under "How long do you want to pause their payments?", leave the option set to Indefinitely.
Select Pause Subscription

Your student's payments will now be paused indefinitely, or until you manually resume them. Your student will receive an email notification about the change.

Pausing Until a Specified Date

When you pause a student's subscription or payment plan until a specified date, you are putting it on hold until a specified date at which the subscription or payment plan will resume automatically. The date that you select to resume billing will mark the beginning of the new billing period, and all subsequent payments will be made according to that date.

For example: Your student signs up for a subscription that recurs every month, on the 10th day of the month. You pause their subscription and set the specified date for the subscription to resume as March 14th. Once the subscription resumes on the 14th of March, your student will be billed on the 14th of every month going forward.

Once you have decided how to proceed, follow the steps below to walk through pausing (or manually resuming) a student account.

To pause a subscription or a payment plan processed through Thinkific Payments until a specified date:

From your Admin Dashboard, select Users
Select All Users
In the Users table click on a student's Full Name to view their profile
Select the Payments tab
Click on the three dots. This button will only show for students with Active or Past due statuses
Under How long do you want to pause their payments?, select Until a custom date. You will need to choose the date you wish to resume the student's payments on from the calendar beside the dropdown.
Select Pause Subscription

The date that the student's subscription is set to renew will be updated in the payments tab. Your student will receive an email notification about the change.

Resume Subscription or Payment Plan

If you have paused a subscription or payment plan indefinitely, you will need to follow the steps below to manually resume payments. It is important to note that the process for resuming the billing for a student with an active account and the process for resuming the billing for a student with a past-due account will look different.

To resume the subscription or payment plan processed through Thinkific Payment:

From your Admin Dashboard, select Users
Select All Users
In the Users table click on a student's Full Name to view their profile
Select the Payments tab
Click on the three dots. This button will only show for students with Active or Past due statuses
Select Resume Subscription
If you are resuming a payment that is past-due: to retry the payment, follow the steps outlined in our Thinkific Payments: Failed Student Payments article.

The subscription or payment plan will be resumed. Your student will receive an email notification about the change.

Cancel Subscription or Payment Plan

If needed, you can cancel a subscription or payment plan on behalf of your student. It is important to note that although there may be circumstances that require you to cancel subscriptions or payment plans for your students, your students are also able to manage their own accounts from their profiles.

Before canceling a student's subscription or payment plan, you may want to consider the less permanent option of pausing the student's account.

To cancel the subscription or payment plan processed through Thinkific Payment:

From your Admin Dashboard, select Users
Select All Users
In the Users table click on a student's Full Name to view their profile
Select the Payments tab
Click on the three dots. This button will only show for students with Active or Past due statuses.
Select Cancel Subscription or Cancel Payment Plan
Type cancel into the text field
Click to Cancel Subscription or Cancel Payment Plan. Please note that this action will finalize the cancelation

Once the cancelation is complete, the Status of the subscription or payment plan will automatically update to Canceled in the Payments table (if it is a subscription) or Closed (if it is a payment plan). The student will lose access to the product on the date their next recurring payment was due (i.e. at the end of their current billing period).

Retry Failed Transactions

Learn more about failed transactions and how to retry them here: Thinkific Payments: Failed Student Payments.

Refund Student Payments

Learn more about refunds here: Thinkific Payments: Refunds.

Frequently Asked Questions

General Questions

If I cancel my paid plan, what will happen to the existing subscriptions/payment plans my students have?

When you cancel your Thihnkific subscription, you will no longer be able to edit or interact with any areas of Thinkific. Existing subscriptions and payment plans processed via TPayments will continue to run, even after you have canceled your account.

Therefore, before canceling your paid plan, manually cancel any recurring/subscription payments from your users.

Thinkific customers who have canceled their account will lose access to subscription pricing going forward. This means you will no longer be able to sell new recurring payment products.

I have a complex scenario that cannot be completed directly in Thinkific. How can I do that?

If youe scenario cannot be completed usign the tools above, please follow the instructions here: Update Subscriptions in Thinkific Payments to fill out the form and reach out to the support.

Questions about Extending Free Trials

Can I shorten the free trial and charge the student earlier than the original billing date?

Not at the moment. It is not possible to change the free trial expiry date to an earlier date.

Will extending the free trial also adjust the product's expiry date for the student?

When a student purchases a subscription the expiry date for the product is set to 23:59:59 UTC on the date of the renewal. The expiry date is extended after each successful payment to the next billing date.

When you extend the trial, the expiry date is automatically extended to match the new billing date.

Questions about Adjusting Billing Dates

Can I adjust the billing date and charge the student earlier?

Not at the moment. It is not possible to change the billing date to an earlier date.

If I adjust the billing date, will the charge be prorated?

No. The student will be charged the same amount they were supposed to be charged, but on the new date.

Will adjusting the billing date also adjust the product's expiry date for the student?

When you adjust the billing date, the expiry date is automatically extended to match the new billing date.

Questions about Pausing Subscriptions and Payment Plans

Is it possible for me to pause a subscription or payment plan without removing my student's product access?

Yes! If you want to pause a subscription without removing the product's access, you can change the billing date to a future date.

What if my student's billing date has changed, and they need access sooner?

If the subscription had been paused after the student's last billing date and they had since lost access, they will regain access to the product on the next billing cycle. If your student requires access to your product sooner, the student can repurchase the product to start the billing cycle over immediately.

Will pausing the billing date also adjust the product's expiry date for the student?

When you pause the subscription or a payment plan, the expiry date is not changed and remains the same. This means that the student might lose access if the you resume the subscription or a payment plan after the original billing date.

Questions about Canceling Subscriptions and Payment Plans

Can my students cancel their own subscriptions?

Yes. Students are able to cancel their own subscriptions from their account profile (as outlined in our How can students manage their billing and credit card information? article).

Can I unenroll a student from a product to remove their access immediately?

Yes. For instructions on manually removing students from bundles, please refer to our article on How to Unenroll Students and Process Refunds.

Can my student reactivate their account at a later date?

Yes. Students can always reactivate their account at a future date if they wish, although they may be required to re-enter their removed credit card information to reactivate the subscription.