# Put the customer on a billing contract

[Charge a customer again](https://devportal.qa.winkpg.io/docs/decide/charge-a-customer-again.md): Whether repeat payments run on a contract the platform bills, on a schedule of your own, on an invoice, or at your checkout, and what the card networks need from each.

Describe the schedule once, and the platform charges the stored payment method on it, so your service never runs a billing timer.

**Your answers so far**

- Is the customer there when each payment is taken? No. We charge them without asking each time.
- Is there a fixed amount on a fixed schedule? Yes. The same amount, every period.

**What to build**

Create the customer, store their payment method, and create a contract that names it with the amount and the schedule. The platform's daily billing run charges each contract that's due, reports each charge as merchant-initiated, and applies the contract's own limits: a maximum number of payments, a maximum failure count, and the backoff after a failure. Don't build a nightly job that walks your own subscriber table and posts sales; that job would re-implement all of this.

**Worth knowing**

- A charge the customer isn't present for needs a stored-credential consent that permits it, captured when the card is stored on a hosted payment page or in the Virtual Terminal. The direct API can't record consent, and a later charge can't add a usage the customer didn't agree to, so ask for every usage you expect to need when the card is stored.
- On a sandbox merchant, a test key can ask for a billing run straight away rather than waiting for the daily one, so you can watch a renewal happen.
- Subscribe to the recurring-billing webhook events for charge succeeded, charge failed, and contract ended, rather than polling contracts for changes.

**Where to go next**

- [Bill a customer on a schedule](https://devportal.qa.winkpg.io/docs/blueprints/bill-a-customer-on-a-schedule.md)
- [Create a contract](https://devportal.qa.winkpg.io/docs/api/contractsCreate.md)
- [Run billing now on a sandbox merchant](https://devportal.qa.winkpg.io/docs/api/sandboxRecurringBillingRunNow.md)
- [Reusing a stored payment method](https://devportal.qa.winkpg.io/docs/guides/reusing-saved-cards.md)

- [Start over](https://devportal.qa.winkpg.io/docs/decide/charge-a-customer-again.md): go back to the first question.

## See also

- [All documentation](https://devportal.qa.winkpg.io/llms.txt): the machine-readable index of every public page on this site.