Failed Payments, Downgrades and Enterprise Contracts

Every workspace is in exactly one of eight billing states, and the Plan & Subscription Overview names it in the same word the AWRA team sees. Trial is the Free plan inside its trial window. Active is paid and renewing. Grace period means a renewal payment failed but the grace window is still open, so everyone keeps full access while it is sorted out. Past due means that window has closed without a payment: only the billing pages work until one lands. Cancelled means renewal was switched off, and access runs to the end of the period already paid for. Recovery means the trial ended or a paid period ran out without renewing, and again only the billing pages work. Suspended is a hold placed by AWRA. Enterprise contract means the workspace is billed by invoice under a negotiated agreement.

The states are checked in a fixed order, and the first match wins. A suspension outranks everything. A contract in force outranks every card state, which is why a workspace on a contract never shows Grace period or Past due: no card renewal is expected of it, so none can fail. After that come trial, the two failed-payment states, cancelled, recovery and finally active. Knowing the order explains combinations that look odd at first, such as a workspace still on the Free plan that shows Enterprise contract: once a contract is in force, it is billed by invoice, so the trial clock no longer decides its access.

In practice: a finance lead opens the overview on a Monday and sees Grace period. Nothing has stopped working, and the team carries on selling and receiving. What the word tells her is that the clock has started, and that the next lesson’s automatic retries are already scheduled. If the same overview read Past due, the team would be locked out of everything except billing, and the only fix would be a payment. The state is the first thing to read before anyone calls support.

When a card renewal is declined, the workspace moves to Grace period with full access, and a grace window opens: seven days by default. Paystack on its own would not try the card again until the next billing date, so AWRA retries it for you. Once a day, early in the morning, it checks every workspace in a grace window and charges the saved card on day 1, day 3 and day 5 of that window, once each. If a run is missed, it charges once for the latest retry due rather than firing the missed ones back to back. Before any charge it checks that the period has not already been paid, through Paystack or by a payment someone made by hand, so a period is never charged twice.

A retry that goes through restores the workspace exactly as a normal renewal does: billing returns to healthy, the plan end date moves to the next period, and the usual receipt is emailed. Your Admins also get a notice in the bell saying the payment went through on an automatic retry. A retry that is declined puts a notice in the Admins’ bell saying when the card will be tried again and the date the grace period ends. If the last retry fails, if there is no saved card to retry, or if two days or fewer of grace remain unpaid, the AWRA support team is alerted once so that someone can contact you before access is restricted. Workspaces on an enterprise contract are not retried at all, because they are billed by invoice.

In practice: a school’s card is declined on 2 March because its monthly limit was reached. The bursar sees Grace period and does nothing. On 3 March the retry is declined again and the Admins get a bell notice. On 5 March the limit has reset, the retry succeeds, the receipt arrives, and the workspace is back to Active without anyone pressing a button. Had the bursar replaced the card on 2 March with Update Payment Method and pressed Retry Payment on the overview, the automatic retries would have seen the payment and stopped.

Before a move to a smaller plan is confirmed, the downgrade and confirm screens show what that plan takes away, worked out for your workspace. Modules locked are areas the smaller plan does not include at all. Modules read-only are areas where people can still view records but can no longer create or change them. Reduced modules keep working with named permissions gone. Limits lists every daily, monthly, per-file, history or schedule limit that tightens, with the figure now and after. A data section says what happens to what you hold, and the answer is that a plan change deletes nothing: records in a locked module stay where they are and open again if you move back. A locked feature is refused on the web, through the API and in the mobile app alike, so a downgrade cannot be worked around from a phone.

Some limits are not shown as losses because they block the move instead. If the workspace holds more users, warehouses, workflows or storage than the smaller plan allows, the downgrade is refused until it fits, rather than trimmed for you. Separately, Settings › Usage & limits now also counts three things the plans do not limit: items in the catalogue, assets on the register that are not retired, and mobile devices signed in to the AWRA app in the last 90 days. Each shows its count and No limit. They are there so you can see your size; they never refuse anything.

In practice: a services company considers a smaller plan to save money. Suppose the preview shows the module its field team logs time in as locked, another module as read-only, a lower monthly AI request limit, and the note that the records are kept. The operations manager realises the locked module is used every day, so the saving would stop real work. They stay on Pro and instead remove two dormant users. A month later a smaller branch does move down, after confirming nothing on its preview was in daily use.

Some organizations cannot pay by card on a monthly cycle: they buy against a purchase order, pay against an invoice, or hold a tax exemption certificate. For them AWRA sets up an enterprise contract. While it is in force, the workspace shows the Enterprise contract state, is billed by invoice instead of a card renewal, and is never locked out for lacking one. A contract can carry negotiated figures for limits such as users, HR employee records, storage and the plan caps; any figure it sets replaces the plan’s, and any it leaves blank stays with the plan.

A contract does not change your plan. The modules and features you can use still come from the plan; the contract changes how you are billed and, where negotiated, how much you may hold. Each contract invoice appears in your billing overview and downloads like any other, and carries the purchase order number and, while the exemption is in force, the exemption reference with VAT at zero. An exemption can end before the contract does, and from that date invoices carry VAT again. AWRA tracks the contract’s renewal date, purchase order expiry and exemption expiry and raises them with its own team ahead of time, by default 60, 30 and 7 days before renewal.

In practice: a county health project buys AWRA through procurement. Its contract records PO 4471, the manual invoice method, an exemption certificate valid to June, and 120 users against the plan’s figure. Invoices go to the finance office quoting the PO, with no VAT until June and VAT from July. The project still uses exactly the modules of its plan; when it later needs Projects, that is a plan change, not a contract edit.