Customer Transfer Overview
It is essential to have a good understanding of Multi-Business Entity before going through this document. For an optimal experience, we strongly advise conducting trials on your test sites before proceeding with actual customer transfers on your live sites.
Agility and adaptability are key in the ever-evolving landscape of business operations and management. Chargebee's feature for transferring customers between business entities embodies this agility, offering a streamlined solution for the dynamic movement of customer accounts across multiple business units. With this functionality, Chargebee facilitates a seamless transition that not only manages the complexity of customer data migration but also maintains the integrity of subscription and billing history.
This tool is indispensable across a range of situations, notably:
- Multi-Entity Adoption: It accelerates multi-entity strategies for merchants by enabling the swift reassignment of customer groups to different entities within their organization.
- Mergers and Divestitures: During organizational restructuring, the customer transfer feature proves invaluable, easing customer account realignment within merged or divested entities.
- Business Changes and Corrections: The feature provides the flexibility to realign customer management strategies swiftly, ensuring compliance with evolving business, legal, and regulatory demands.
- Compliance and Auditing: It ensures that historical data retention complies with stringent auditing and financial regulations, facilitating access to comprehensive financial records for auditing purposes.
Chargebee's Customer Transfer feature thus stands as a testament to the service's commitment to flexibility, efficiency, and compliance in subscription management.
Overview of Customer Transfer
The methodical process of customer transfer in Chargebee is designed with continuity and clarity in mind. It involves cloning the customer's information while preserving ongoing subscriptions at the source entity for the current term. Chargebee clones these subscriptions at the beginning of the next billing cycle in the destination business entity, transferring the ones that coincide with the billing cycle on the transfer date.
From the customer's point of view, the benefits are multiple and significant:
- Smooth Transition: The transfer respects the current billing cycle, ensuring uninterrupted service and avoiding billing complexities.
- Consolidated Billing: New subscriptions in the destination business entity are established/cloned at the billing cycle's outset. This consolidation simplifies billing and administrative tasks for you, offering greater convenience.
- Billing Clarity: The alignment of subscriptions with billing cycles in the destination entity promotes transparency, negating the confusion that often accompanies prorated charges or mid-cycle adjustments.
This guide is tailored to assist when the originating business entity is active, delineating the steps for a successful customer transfer.
Getting Started
The following are the topics that will enable you to get started with this feature:
Glossary of Terms
- Multi-Business-Entity (MBE): A configuration within Chargebee that allows businesses to manage and operate multiple legal entities or business units as separate entities, often catering to different regional markets or brands.
- Business Entity (BE): A legally established organization that conducts business by providing goods or services, with its own set of legal and financial responsibilities, also referred to simply as an "Entity."
- Source Entity: The original business unit from which a customer's data is being transferred. It houses the customer's current subscription and associated historical data.
- Destination Entity: The target business unit to which the customer is being transferred. Post-transfer, the customer's data, and subscriptions will be managed here.
- Transferring Customers: The act of moving customer data, including subscription information, from one entity to another within a multi-entity setup.
- Deprecated Reason: A new attribute in Chargebee's customer and subscription resources intended to track the reason for a customer or subscription's status change, not currently exposed via the API.
- Business Entity Change: A value indicating that the customer or subscription data is deprecated due to a change in the business entity.
- Null: Indicates that there is no specific reason assigned for deprecation.
- TBD in future: Placeholder for additional reasons that may be incorporated in future updates.
- Transferred Status: A label used to designate that a customer's subscription has been transferred or replicated to a different entity within the Chargebee platform.
