Overview
When you create a customer account in Zuora, you specify the currency in which this customer should be billed. After that customer account has been created, you might wonder how to change the currency that you originally specified for that customer.
The short answer? You cannot change the currency for a subscriber after you have created the customer account.
The longer answer? Keep reading.
Solution
Within Zuora, when you view the detail of an existing customer account and try to edit the Billing and Payment Info for that customer, you will notice that the Currency is read-only and cannot be edited:
Zuora does not allow you to change the currency for a customer account after it has been created.
It's important to understand why Zuora disallows this action. If Zuora allowed you to change the currency for a customer, it would likely result in the customer account and its underlying subscriptions getting into an inconsistent state. For example:
- The customer account has a payment gateway associated with it. What happens if the payment gateway does not support the new currency that you want to select?
- The customer account likely has one or more subscriptions associated with it. When you first created a subscription for a customer, you specified the subscription pricing in that customer's currency (for example, 15 dollars per month). If you simply change the currency for that customer (for example, from dollars to euros), Zuora will not know what price to charge the customer in the new currency.
- Now add to this the fact that you have probably already invoiced the customer and collected payments in the customer's original currency. What should be done to all of these historical invoices and transactions if you were to change the customer's currency? Moreover, let's suppose you collected a payment in dollars, and Zuora allowed you to then change the customer's currency to euros. What would it mean to then try issuing a refund in euros, when the original payment was in dollars?
Does your head hurt? It's complicated, and not just a matter of changing the value of a field from one currency to another. This is why Zuora disallows this currency change from taking place.
Workarounds to Consider
However, there can be legitimate use cases where you want to change the currency for a customer account. This section describes two common use cases, and the workarounds you can consider using:
- You made a mistake. When you originally created the customer, you might have simply made a mistake and picked the wrong currency. In this case, the workaround is relatively straightforward: You can cancel or delete the erroneous customer account and then create a new one with the correct currency.
- A subscriber relocates to a new country and really wants to be billed in a different currency. In this case, you can consider the following:
- First, cancel the customer's original subscription, so the customer is no longer billed in the old currency. In this situation, do not to delete the original customer account or subscription, because you will want to keep the historical data for that subscription (including invoices, payments, and refund history) within Zuora for your records.
- Second, create a new customer account for this subscriber, selecting the new currency to be used. Then add a subscription for this new customer account, with pricing defined in the new currency. When you activate this new subscription, the customer will start being billed in the new currency.
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