Recurring Memberships: Update the existing recurring contribution when selected

Overview

We have a situation where Members transition from one type to another. We recently setup recurring memberships, but are running into the scenario that the recurring payments are not updated.

I'm aware that there are reasons that some don't want this done automatically, which is totally fine with me. But I was wondering if we couldn't provide a checkbox allowing the update to happen since I feel that it makes sense to provide out-of-the-box.

Example use-case

1. Member uses a Contribution page and pays for a Recurring Membership
2. Member contacts the Organization to have their Membership changed to another one
3. The organization goes to the Members page and attempts to change their Membership
4. They override the Membership but the recurring transaction still charges the original amount

Current behaviour

Proposed behaviour

We provide the option to allow them to update the actual next recurring amount. I can see there is already a place that we could handle this and modify the Recurring contribution amount with the new total amount.

Coments

I already implemented the UI to handle this, but wanted to ensure there wasn't something I am missing here in terms Payment Processors prior to proposing a patch.

FWIW I know that Ellen has an extension that deals specifically with Contributions, but I couldn't get this to work with Memberships. Also, I was thinking it could be a good addition to core.

added comp:CiviMember label

So I have most of this working and will create a merge request. I discovered two issues pertaining to updateContributionOnMembershipTypeChange.

• The actual Financial Type isn't updated properly for the LineItems to the most recent Financial Type (for each Membership we have different Financial Types)
• Changing to a lower price set it sets the Contribution to Pending refund and therefore the proper taxes aren't calculated (until it is set to Completed)

A pull request related to this issue has been opened with the title: #5802 (closed) Initial Recurring Membership Contribution modification

added improvement triaged labels

So as a follow-up discussion @mattwire explained that there was several extensions that do some of this work already

• https://lab.civicrm.org/extensions/upgraderecur
• https://lab.civicrm.org/extensions/variablerecurpayments

So make changes and patches to those would probably be a good approach. Update Recurring was more inline with what I had proposed, but provides a batch processing mechanism for identifying and upgrading Memberships with Recurring amounts.

closed

Just to note - I may submit a patch soon that supports a similar workflow (canceling an existing recurring subscription) when switching from recurring to non-recurring payments. But it may also end up in an extension.

Awesome!

For sure that would be useful, and probably something I would use. I do think having the ability to Cancel in general is important if there is a recurring contribution. The UX is a bit confusing and I had several clients not understand why the contributions were still going through after cancelling Memberships.