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I have manage to get my site to work with paypal billing CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile however I am confused regarding the fields of

BILLINGPERIOD & BILLINGFREQUENCY

If I set first to Monthly and second to 12 hoping it would charge my customers each month I get this is email: "Billing cycle:Every 12 Months" Is this correct?

What if I want it to charge daily? I tried doing 'Day' and '365' and it said billing cycle 365 days which sounds to me like after every year.

I couldn't find anything clear in the documentation as well so kindly direct me. Thanks.

Usman Zaheer
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1 Answers1

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You're on the right track. From the PayPal docs:

Make one payment per billing cycle. Each billing cycle has 2 components:

  • The billing period specifies the unit to calculate the billing cycle (such as days or months).
  • The billing frequency specifies the number of billing periods that make up the billing cycle.

For example, if the billing period is Month and the billing frequency is 2, the billing cycle is 2 months. If the billing period is Week and the billing frequency is 6, PayPal schedules the payments every 6 weeks.

In your stated example, setting BILLINGPERIOD to Monthly and BILLINGFREQUENCY to 12 will schedule payments once every 12 months.

To schedule payments once each month, you must set BILLINGPERIOD to Monthly and BILLINGFREQUENCY to 1.

Similarly, to schedule payments daily, you must set BILLINGPERIOD to Day and BILLINGFREQUENCY to 1.

Josh
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    And to limit it to 12 billings every 1 months, set TOTALBILLINGCYCLES=12, BILLINGPERIOD=Month, BILLINGFREQUENCY=1 – Robert Feb 15 '12 at 06:43
  • Thanks Josh, Just one question, the doc also said something like billingperiod and billingfrequency should not exceed one year, what's that supposed to mean. – Usman Zaheer Feb 15 '12 at 11:46
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    Robert, do you mean limit billings to one year? Because '12 billings every 1 month' doesn't make sense. Thanks – Usman Zaheer Feb 15 '12 at 12:05
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    @UsmanZaheer This means, for instance, you cannot have `BILLINGPERIOD` set to `Monthly` and `BILLINGFREQUENCY` set to `13` (greater than 1 year), or `BILLINGPERIOD` set to `Day` and `BILLINGFREQUENCY` set to `366` (greater than 1 year). Do those examples help? – Josh Feb 15 '12 at 14:41
  • Took me a while to get this, but this is necessary because of how date math works. For example some months are not always 30 days. February is 28 days sometimes and others 29. So if you wanted to bill someone every 3 months you HAVE to know a frequency and a billing period so it knows how to calculate correctly. Hope this helps someone understand it better. – Joseph Astrahan Mar 03 '14 at 03:57
  • BILLINGPERIOD should be Month, not Monthly – guigouz May 15 '14 at 14:24
  • sorry for asking here but i have question: If i set `BILLINGPERIOD=Month`, `BILLINGFREQUENCY=1` and `TOTALBILLINGCYCLES=0` then i can billed every month until the profile is canceled or deactivated correct? – Purvesh Desai Oct 21 '15 at 13:04