Billing and your subscription
Where the subscription is managed, what an invoice contains, how a plan change takes effect, and what happens if payment lapses.
The account portal
The subscription is not managed inside the workspace. It lives in the account portal, in the account area on the main site, where the person who pays signs in.
The portal has pages for the account overview, the subscription, saved payment cards, invoices, the organisation's profile and its security.
Invoices
Invoices are listed newest first, and each one has a PDF.
The PDF is produced in the account's own language, and lays out right to left when that language does. It carries the issuer's details, the document type, the issue, due and paid dates, who it is billed to, the line items, the subtotal, any discount, VAT and the total.
Where the charge was in a different currency, the invoice records the exchange rate that was used and when it was taken, so the figure on the document is fixed rather than recalculated later. An unpaid invoice also carries the bank transfer details.
Changing plan
Changing plan is self service and takes two steps. You choose a new plan and billing cycle and are shown what it costs, with the current period taken into account, before anything is committed.
Confirming then does one of three things:
- A change that only takes effect later tells you the date it will happen.
- An upgrade with something to pay raises an invoice and takes you to pay it. The new plan starts when that payment settles, not when you confirm.
- A change fully covered by a voucher applies at once.
From the same page you can switch automatic renewal off, cancel so that access continues to the end of the period you have already paid for, and resume.
A module your plan does not include
If you open a module your plan does not include, the workspace answers as though the page does not exist.
That is deliberate. A module you have not bought is not a permission you could ask for, and CommonLynk declines to advertise the shape of the paid product to a workspace that does not have it.
A workspace with no plan at all is different again. It gets a branded page saying that the workspace is not provisioned yet, because that is an account state a person resolves rather than a permission verdict.
If payment lapses
Your workspace does not vanish if payment lapses. It moves through two stages, and nothing is deleted automatically at any point.
| Stage | What you can do | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Grace | Everything stays readable. You can open and download whatever you could before, and you cannot save changes. | About thirty days, in the published policy. |
| Dormant | The workspace is closed and waits. Your data is kept, and paying restores access. | About six months, in the published policy. |
At the start of grace CommonLynk automatically builds one final complete copy of your workspace and keeps it available for you to download throughout both stages, from the account portal, which stays reachable the whole time.
Only after the dormant period does a workspace become eligible for permanent deletion, and that happens with notice, as a decision a person takes, never on a timer.