📝 Overview

You may need to pause an individual customer's membership, for example because of an injury or travel plans. Placing a membership on hold sets a period where it is not valid for class bookings and all billing is paused.

Any bookings during the hold period are removed, and the customer's class usage and payments are adjusted to reflect the time their membership was inactive.

This guide covers how to create a hold for one customer, what happens once it is scheduled, and how to edit it.

💡 If you need to stop a customer booking sessions temporarily without pausing their membership and billing, block them from booking instead.

See How to block members from booking sessions here.

💡 To place several memberships on hold at the same time, see How to put memberships on hold in bulk here.

⏸️ How To Put a Membership on Hold

Holds are created from the customer's membership detail page. Go to Customers ➜ Customer List ➜ search the customer ➜ click the membership below their name ➜ Hold.

From here you set the duration of the hold, then decide how usage and payments should be prorated.

Click the arrow to learn more about creating a hold

1️⃣ Set the duration

The hold form lets you create either an open-ended hold, or a hold with a known end date.

If the hold is for a fixed duration, enter the dates you would like the hold to start and end on, and click Next.

💡 Open-ended holds are useful when a customer is injured and neither of you knows when they will be fit again. An open-ended hold is created immediately and does not calculate prorated payments until an end date is set.

Once an open ended hold has been created, you can then delete the hold entirely, or you can edit the hold to set an end date on a later date.

2️⃣ Review the usage and payment prorates

If you set an end date, the next screen handles payment and usage prorates. The system tells you whether a prorate is owed and displays a breakdown of the calculation.

The payment for the period starting on reactivation is rescheduled to the day the membership becomes active again, and the amount is adjusted accordingly, including taxes and fees. The tool also calculates how many classes the customer is entitled to once their membership is reactivated.

To see exactly how a figure was reached, click Learn more about these calculations, but you can also click on the arrow below.

Click here to learn more about how prorates are calculated

First, we find the number of classes allowed in the partial period after the hold ends. For example, if the period is 30 days long and 5 days remain when the hold ends, the customer can use 1/6 of the total classes. Because you can't take a fraction of a class, we round up to the next whole number.
We determine how much money the customer owes for those classes by taking a ratio of the classes they can take to the classes they could have taken in the entire period. For example, if they can take 3 out of the normally allowed 6, they owe half the regular price.
If the customer already paid for the full period that contains the start of the hold, they are owed credit back for classes they'll miss as a result of the hold. We first find how many classes they were allowed to take before the hold starts, and subtract that from the total allowed for that period. The monetary value is computed as seen in the previous step.
We subtract the two to see how much the customer owes. If the value is negative, the customer is owed money back, which you can issue as account credit.

💡 Prorates work differently for unlimited memberships and memberships with usage limits. For worked examples of both, including when a customer is owed a credit, see Membership Holds & Payment Rescheduling here.

3️⃣ Use Advanced options if you need to override anything

Sometimes you will want to charge a different amount to the one the hold tool calculates, such as continuing to charge the full amount or not charging at all. Advanced options let you override the defaults.

🟡 Override the payment amount

Whatever the membership's limits, you can override the prorated payment by ticking Override the prorate amount due upon reactivation and editing the amount.

This can be set to zero if you would prefer not to charge anything.

🟠 Override the class allocation

If the membership has limits, the system works out how many classes the customer is entitled to after the hold ends. For example, on a membership allowing 6 classes per month with a hold ending mid-month, they would be allowed 3 classes afterwards.

If you want to give them a different allocation, tick Do not prorate classes.

🔵 Override an account credit

Where a hold results in the customer being owed money, an account credit is given as soon as the hold is created. You can change the amount of credit given, including setting it to zero, from Advanced options.

🟢 Extend expiration dates

Advanced options also include Extend expiration dates. With this switched on, packs and prepaid plans have their expiration extended by the number of days the hold lasted, and recurring plans have their expiration date and any commitment period extended by the number of billing periods the hold spans.

When you are happy with the settings, click Create Hold.

🔍 What Happens After the Hold Is Scheduled

Once the hold is in place, you can see its effect on both the customer's class allowance and their payments.

🔷 Prorated class usage

The membership usage page shows the prorated usage limits, provided you allowed the hold to prorate classes. Go to Customers ➜ Customer List ➜ search the customer ➜ Memberships tab ➜ click the membership ➜ Usage tab.

In the example below, normal periods allow 10 classes plus 3 Yoga classes per month. After a 16 day hold, only 5 plus 2 Yoga classes are allowed in July.

🟩 Skipped and rescheduled payments

You will see confirmation that the membership is on hold in the membership details, and you can view which payments are due to be skipped in the Upcoming Payments tab.

🔶 Recurring reservations

The customer is removed from any classes they had booked during the hold period. Recurring reservations are reactivated once the hold is over, and the customer is booked back into their classes.

📆 Editing a Hold

If the customer's plans change, you can edit an existing hold to adjust its start or end date.

Go to Customers ➜ Customer List ➜ search the customer ➜ Memberships tab ➜ click the membership, then choose the option to edit the hold.

You will then be prompted to delete the existing hold, and the create a new hold with your desired parameters, so you can enter the new dates for the hold, in the same way as when you first created it.

⚠️ Always edit a hold rather than deleting and recreating it.

Editing preserves the proration calculations, whereas deleting removes the hold without prorating payments or class usage, which can leave billing discrepancies to correct manually.

💡 To remove a hold entirely rather than change its dates, see Removing holds here.

To edit or end several holds at once, see How to edit or end holds in bulk here.

When you attempt to edit a hold which is scheduled to start on a future date, you will only be able to delete it, so that you can re-add the hold with the new dates.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Find answers to common questions or additional details that may not be covered in the main instructions.