Understand Advanced Billing Communications

Advanced Billing sends email to your subscribers on your behalf throughout the subscription lifecycle, from the signup confirmation through renewal reminders, receipts, and dunning notices. You control which of those emails go out, what they say, and how they look, and you can also email your subscribers directly when something happens that Advanced Billing doesn't have a template for.

Key capabilities

Advanced Billing gives you the following control over the email your site sends:

• Turn individual emails on or off. Each email type has its own setting, so you can send receipts but suppress renewal reminders, or the reverse.
• Rewrite the content of any email. Templates hold the wording of each message and support Liquid variables, so an email can address the subscriber by name or quote their invoice total.
• Control the look of every email at once. Layouts hold your CSS and page structure, and each template renders inside the layout you assign to it.
• Email subscribers directly. Bulk email sends either a prewritten payment method update request or a message you write yourself, to whichever subscriptions you select.
• Confirm what was delivered. Every email is recorded, both across your whole site and on the individual subscriber, with a delivery status you can filter and export.

Which emails Advanced Billing sends

Email settings live under Config > Settings, in the Emails section. Each email type appears there as its own card with a check box to enable it and a link into the editor.

Every site can send the following:

• Sign-up
• Customer Receipt
• End of Trial
• Upcoming Invoice
• Cancellation
• Update Payment Request

The following appear only when the relevant feature is in use on your site:

• Card Expiration - when your site accepts credit card payments.
• ACH Authorization Agreement - when your site accepts ACH payments.
• Bank Account Verification - when your site uses Stripe Connect with ACH.
• Direct Debit Instruction - when your site uses BECS or BECS NZ notifications.
• Term Renewal - on sites using term-based subscriptions.
• Prepaid Subscription Payment Receipt, Suspended Prepaid Subscription, and Reactivated Prepaid Subscription - when prepaid subscriptions are enabled.

Dunning emails are configured separately, under Config > Retries & Dunning. Sites using invoice-based billing also send Invoice Issued (Automatic Payment), Invoice Issued (remittance), Invoices Issued, Proforma Invoice Issued, and Invoice In Advance Issued emails, and every site can send a Portal invitation.

Prerequisites

What you can change depends on your permission level:

• Editing email settings, templates, and layouts requires the account permission described as manages product catalog, settings, and integrations. Admins have it by default.
• Sending bulk email requires Admin access. That permission alone isn't enough.

Your responsibilities

Maxio delivers the emails, but the content and its consequences remain yours:

• The wording of every template and every custom email, including whether it makes clear who is writing and why.
• Keeping your own records of anything you send by custom bulk email, which isn't stored against an individual subscriber. A payment method update request is different: it's linked to the subscription it was sent for, so you can find it by filtering the site-wide Archives page by Subscription ID.
• Testing your changes before they reach real subscribers. Advanced Billing renders templates against sample data so you can preview a message without sending it.
• The HTML in your layouts. Maxio Support can't debug custom layout or template markup for you.

Limitations

Keep the following constraints in mind when planning how you use email:

• Layout bodies must be strict, well-formed XML rather than merely valid HTML, and every layout must contain the {{ main_content }} tag.
• Bulk email is sent as plain text. HTML, Markdown, and template variables aren't supported there.
• Subscribers can't opt out of bulk email, so it's only appropriate for information they genuinely need.
• On a test site, an email addressed to more than five recipients isn't delivered.
• Outbound emails to subscribers aren't available through the API.

Find the article you need

Email behavior is documented across several articles, split by the job you are trying to do.

Related information

To turn individual emails on or off and set their timing, see Configure Email Settings.

To change the wording of any of these messages, see Customize Email Templates.

To send a one-off message outside these automated emails, see Send Bulk Email to Subscribers.