Stopping, pausing and unenrolling
Stop at period end or immediately, why pause is a roster status rather than a button, and what never touches the roster.
There are three different things people mean by "stop billing them", and Dojo Tiger treats them as three different operations. Getting them straight is worth five minutes, because two of them are reversible and one costs the family money.
| You want to… | Do this |
|---|---|
| Stop charging, keep them training | Stop in the Billing column |
| Pause them for a month or two | Set the enrollment status to Suspended |
| End their membership | Set the enrollment status to Inactive |
Stopping billing
Students then Enrollments → the Billing column → Stop. The button is there in every state that has a live subscription: Active, Past due and Paused.
The dialog opens with the sentence that matters most:
No more monthly payments will be taken from the student's card. This does not change their enrollment — they stay on the roster until you change it.
Then two buttons, and the difference between them is real money.
Stop at the end of the paid period
The primary option, listed first. The family keeps the month they have already paid for; nothing further is taken after that.
The row stays Active with an Ending badge, and the date line changes from renews 3 Sep to ends 3 Sep. On that date it stops.
This is almost always the right choice.
Stop immediately
Collection stops now. The family has usually already paid for the current month, so this leaves them out of pocket for the remainder of it — and nothing raises a refund automatically.
Use it when the money should not have been taken at all, and follow it with a refund if part of the month is owed back.
There is also a Keep billing button, which is just "cancel" — nothing changes.
Stopping billing is never the student leaving
Neither option touches the roster. The student stays enrolled, stays on the attendance sheet, and stays in your active-enrollment count. If they are actually leaving, change the enrollment status as well.
Pausing is not a button
This is the least discoverable behaviour in the app, and it is worth a paragraph of its own.
There is no Pause button in the Billing column. A subscription pauses because its enrollment was set to Suspended — the ordinary status dropdown in the Actions column, the same one you'd use for a student taking the summer off.
- Active → Suspended — collection is paused. The subscription survives, the billing date is kept, and the Billing column shows Paused.
- Suspended → Active — collection resumes. Nothing is charged for the months in between; a paused month does not accumulate as a debt.
A paused month is genuinely skipped rather than deferred, so a family suspended for July and resumed in August is not billed twice in August.
Re-activating only resumes a pause you set
Setting an already-active enrollment back to Active does nothing to billing, and does not clear a pause somebody set deliberately elsewhere. Only the transition out of Suspended resumes collection.
Unenrolling
Setting the enrollment status to Inactive ends the membership and sets the subscription to stop at the end of the paid period — the family keeps the month they bought, and there is no immediate cancel to refund.
You do not need to stop the billing separately. Marking somebody inactive is enough.
The reverse is not true: stopping the billing does not mark anybody inactive.
What the roster does and doesn't do
| Roster change | What happens to billing |
|---|---|
| Active → Suspended | Paused |
| Suspended → Active | Resumed |
| Active → Inactive | Stops at the end of the paid period |
| Inactive → Active | Nothing. Start billing again from the Billing column. |
And in the other direction, the only one you need to remember:
Nothing in the payment system ever changes the roster
Not a stopped subscription, not a failed card, not a cancelled payment method, not a disconnected Stripe account. A billing failure is a billing fact, not an attendance fact — a child whose parent's card expired still turns up on Tuesday and is still on the register.
If a student should come off the roster, somebody has to say so on the enrollment.
When Stop doesn't work
| Message | What it means |
|---|---|
| "This enrollment is not on monthly billing." | There is no live subscription — it has already been stopped, or it never started. |
| "This subscription is still being confirmed with the payment provider." | The start is still settling at Stripe. A nightly job resolves it; try again after that. |
| "Charging is turned off for this studio." | Card charging has been switched off, which takes the Stop button down with it. Turn card charging back on, stop the billing, then switch it off again. |
| "We could not confirm this with the payment provider." | Stripe could not be reached. Nothing has been changed — check Stripe before trying again. |
If a family asks to cancel
They cannot do it themselves. Families see their monthly billing on their own payments page but have no cancel or pause control there, by design — every change goes through the studio.
So the answer at the desk is: take the request, stop it from the Billing column, and tell them which of the two options you used. See What families see.
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