View patron payment history

  • Updated

Understanding your patrons’ payment history is an important part of running your business. Information is powerful. You can find patrons' payment history details within a few clicks in your Relationship Manager. You’ll be able to find out when they first joined, upgraded or downgraded to a different tier, or if they’ve had a declined payment at any point. This information is available on desktop and mobile web, but not on our iOS and Android apps currently.

Please note that while these examples are in US Dollar ($), it is possible that you could be billed in any of our supported currencies, depending on the currency that the creator chooses to bill in. To find a list of supported currencies, please visit this guide here. 

In this article we’ll go through:

How do I find the payment history of a patron?

Follow the steps below to find any patron’s history:
  1. While logged in to your creator profile, click on the Patrons link from the left sidebar navigation
  2. You'll land on your Relationship Manager
  3. If you know which patron’s history you’d like to review, you can search for their profile name in the search bar. Alternatively, you can filter your list down by:
    • Status: You can choose to find Active patrons, Former patrons, patrons whose cards have been Declined, or Followers
    • Tiers: This shows you the tier a patron is in. You can choose to filter for all patrons that chose No Rewards, or patrons in any of your tiers
    • Pledge amount: You can filter which patrons you’d like to view based on the amount they pay
    • Join date: You can filter by Paid, Refunded, Declined, or patrons that have been marked for Fraud. (learn more about patrons marked as Fraud here) 
    • Charge Frequency: If you have annual patrons, you will have an added filter in your to filter patrons by Charge frequency. In the pledge column of the page, you’ll be able to find patrons’ charge frequency “per month” for monthly memberships, and “per year” for annual membership patrons. Additionally, the CSV file will include a charge frequency column on the spreadsheet. Learn more about how the annual membership beta works in our article
  4. Click on any patron’s name to pull up their profile details on the right-hand side of your manager
  5. Click on See all payment history at the bottom right of the page, in their Payment history section
  6. A window will populate with the patrons’ complete payment history. This history will include any changes to their Tier or payment amount. Learn more about what each Status means here

How do I read my patrons’ payment history? 

Each entry in your patrons’ payment history represents a processed payment or a change to their membership. Below, you’ll find what each column means: 

Date

The date shown in the far left column indicates when a payment or membership change took place. 

Tier

If you are on either the Pro or Premium creator plan, you’ll find the Tier your patron was in during each event. If you find a Custom pledge this means that your patron was not in one of your Tiers when they signed up or changed to that at some point. 

Amount 

In the Amount column, you’ll find the amount that a patron was billed. If you are in our annual memberships beta, you’ll also be able to identify monthly membership patrons from per year memberships. Learn more about managing annual patrons in this article. 

Status

The status column lets you know if a payment was successful or not. Here’s a breakdown of what the status of a patron’s payment history means:
  • Paid: This means the payment was successful
  • Declined: This means the card was declined by the patrons’ bank. Learn more about declines here 
  • Upgraded: The patron has successfully increased their payment amount or tier level
  • Downgraded: The patron has successfully decreased their payment amount or tier level
  • Deleted: This means that the patron deleted their membership 
  • Repledged: Means they’ve become your patron again
  • Refunded: This means that a particular bill has been refunded. You can find a full list of every refund initiated on your account, by heading to the Refunds page of your Income section
  • Tier deleted: When you’ve removed a Tier from your page. When you delete a Tier, it doesn’t delete a patron’s payment, so be sure to communicate the change with patrons ahead of time. Learn more about retiring a Tier in this article
If you charge patrons up front, an Upgraded status means that the patron has successfully paid that amount. 

What does a declined bill mean? 

When you find a bill entry listed as Declined, it indicates that our attempt to process that bill was declined by the patron’s bank. There are a variety of reasons why a patron’s bank might decline a payment – most often it is not malicious, and the patron can resolve the issue by contacting their bank directly.
Here are a few common reasons why patrons’ payments might decline: 
  • If the patron’s credit card details are outdated – if a patron gets a new card with a new CVV, or expiration date, this will cause the payment to decline. 
  • If the patron is attempting to use a prepaid “gift” card — we currently don’t support prepaid cards. 
  • PayPal declines - the patron may need to update their payment details with their PayPal wallet. If a patron has revoked access, or their bank does not permit the purchase, they may need to add a new funding method to their PayPal wallet. 

FAQ

Why are there gaps in my patrons’ payment history? 

  • Did you take a break? 
    If you’ve taken a break from charging your patrons by pausing payments you’ll find patrons’ payment history skips over that month. 
  • The patron may have paused their payment – this feature is now deprecated
    Prior to 2018, patrons could pause a month of payment. We deprecated this ability because we saw that patrons opted to extend their pause, and the intended purpose of giving patrons a break for a month wasn’t working. If you find gaps in a patron’s payment history before 2018, this may be why. 
  • They may have canceled and then resubscribed
    You’ll find this denoted with “Deleted” and “Repledged” in the Status column. 
  • Do you offer patrons annual memberships?
  • If you are in our annual memberships beta, your patrons’ “Last charge date” will be the date that they joined. They won’t be charged again until the 1st of the month after 12 months have passed. If you are in our annual memberships beta, you can learn more about this in this article. 

Why is this information useful? 

As creators, having access to transparent and detailed payment history with your patrons is important. 

The details in a patron’s payment history will help in benefits delivery, particularly if you charge your patrons per creation as it lets you know exactly which posts patrons are paying for. 

These details will also help you better understand patron behavior. If you notice trends in Downgrades or Upgrades, this can serve as an opportunity to hone in on what content your patrons value most.

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