Why do active subscriptions numbers change over time
When you are looking at the active subscriptions on the Subscriptions Report, you may sometimes notice that the number of active subscriptions can change for the same day/week/month over time.
For example let's say it is December 13th and you look at the number of active subscriptions on the previous day the December 12th and see there were 2,609 active subscriptions
However, when you revisit this report again a month later and look at the same date the number has changed, in this example to 2,706 active subscriptions.
There are a couple of possible reasons for this.
#1 If you have the On Hold subscriptions and/or Pending Cancel subscriptions set to be churned subscriptions in your report settings.
Then we could have subscriptions that are in the on-hold/pending-cancelled status that will currently not be included in the 2,609 number as they are seen as not active.
(we use the last status change date to determine when they went on-hold/pending-cancelled)
So we could have a subscription like this one which went on hold a few months ago and is in the on-hold status (and not active) when looking at it on December 13th.
However, when the subscription finally moves to the cancelled status, it is the finished date (end date) that is used to determine when the subscription ended.
In this case, that subscription is now finished and the end date is December 14th.
So as the Subscription end date is after the 12th of December, it will show in that report as being active until the 14th of December i.e on the 12th of December it is showing as active and now counted as part of the active subscriptions on the 12th.
Metorik doesn't currently have a way to determine on what days historically it went active/inactive. So for a Subscription that has ended... it just uses the date it started and the date it ended.... and shows that the subscription was active between those two dates.
#2 You could have a subscription again like in the previous example that is in the on-hold status when we checked it on the 12th of December and thus also not counted in the active subscriptions count at that time.
But this time the Customer decided to re-activate the subscription by the time you come back to check on the number again at a later date.
As mentioned in scenario #1, Metorik doesn't currently have a way to determine on what days historically it went active/inactive. So for a Subscription that has been re-activated and is now in the active status... it is seen as having been active since the start of the subscription.
Thus when we have come back at that later date to check the number active subscriptions on the 12th of December, this subscription is now being counted in the active subscription numbers unlike before.
The issue is that we don't currently know the exact date a subscription changes to being 'on hold' or 'pending cancel', unless it is the current status, due to some technical limitations of WooCommerce Subscriptions and the storing of the data.
We understand that this can be somewhat confusing and frustrating to see the data change. In the future, we will try to look into finding a more solid solution of storing the number of active subscriptions each day statically so that there is no change. But for now, these are the possible reasons you maybe see variations in the numbers of active subscriptions over time.