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Understanding how suspensions affect billing contracts

Suspensions are designed to freeze a contract, so when the client returns to your business, they can pick up where they left off. That means if a client purchased a monthly contract, they would still get a month's worth of services, even if they took a break in the middle of the contract.

It's important to point this out because a suspended contract will ultimately move the original end date of the contract further out. How far out it's moved, is determined by the time that the contract sits in suspension.

How suspending contracts works

In our example above of a client purchasing a monthly contract, let's say they start in January. They use their contract for part of January. Then they ask to suspend their contract for two weeks. Since the contract is suspended, the client won't be charged again at the end of the month, like originally planned. They'll be charged two weeks after the end of the month, instead, so the client can enjoy a full month's services. The new billing date will be February 14th.


How to find a list of suspended contracts

Businesses who have multiple contracts to reinstate due to renovation closures, natural disasters, or extended holiday breaks, will have the task of un-suspending contracts when they return, so their software will start charging clients automatically, again.

Suspensions will automatically lift on the scheduled end date, but if a client decides to return early, you can manually unsuspend the contracts or end open-ended suspensions.

To accomplish this, the first step is to find the suspended contracts. This is where the Autopay Detail report is helpful because this will give you a list of clients with suspended contracts to work from.

To find the Autopay Detail report, log into your Mindbody software, and go to the Reports tab.

  1. Click the Payment Processing menu.
  2. Then, select the Autopay Detail report.
  3. The next step is to set the start and end dates in the filters section. We recommend choosing the date where you first started suspending contracts for any closure and setting the end date for the last day in the month when you're reinstating contracts. It's important to note: The report will look for any autopays that will not run during that time frame because of the suspension and will list them in the results, even if they're from the same contract.
  4. Also in the filters section, click the down arrow for the Status filter, located to the right of the date filters. Select 'Suspended' for the status.
  5. Click 'Generate' to run the report.

Next, let's narrow the list, so we only see client accounts.

  1. From the generated list of suspended autopays within our time frame, we can narrow our results to view just the list of clients' names by clicking the yellow 'Tag new' button.
  2. Click OK to close the new window.
  3. Then, open the advanced client search page by clicking into the 'Search for a client' search bar and choosing 'advanced search'.
  4. Click to open the filters, if they aren't already expanded, and check the box for 'Tagged clients only'.
  5. Then, click Search.

This is a list of all the clients who have suspended contracts. You can use this list as a reference as clients ask to reinstate their suspended memberships.


How to un-suspend the contracts.

  1. Select the client from our list of clients with contract suspensions. Alternatively, if you know the client’s name, look up the client who wants to lift their contract suspension using the search bar in the upper left-hand corner of your screen.

  2. Go to the client's Account Details screen.

  3. Scroll down to the "Contracts" section.

  4. To the right of the contract’s details, click Suspended.

  5. Click Unsuspend.

  6. Click OK on the confirmation pop-up.


An alternate route for reinstating contracts

Instead of unsuspending your contracts, you can decide to terminate the contract and resell them, instead. This is the best option if you want clients to keep their same billing date.

To learn how, first, check out this help article from Mindbody's Support Center on how to terminate a contract. Then, follow this link to watch the learning activity on how to sell contracts.