Understand the flow

Recurring billing is essential for businesses that offer services in a subscription model, allowing to charge customers automatically at defined intervals. To support this, payment systems rely on secure, reusable credentials stored in recurring tokens.

Understanding the role of each element of the recurring payment is critical to building reliable, secure, and customer-friendly billing flows.

This section breaks down the following terms: recurring payments, recurring orders, recurring token, card and subscription ID, clarifying their relationships, and outlines how they are used in subscription scenarios.

Recurring as a payment flow is automated subsequent payments that occur on a regular schedule, such as monthly or annually.

Requires customer input only once, during the first payment
Recurring Token and Subscription id is being re-used for the subsequent payments
Triggered by your charging system, not the payment gateway

Let’s Clarify

Statement	Yes / No	Explanation
A recurring token automatically triggers recurring payments	No	A recurring token only enables future charges. Your system must schedule and trigger them.
Subsequent payments require only a recurring token	No	Even though the subscription id is linked to a token, both needs to be used for the subsequent payments.
A token can be reused for multiple charges	Yes	As long as it's valid, the same token can be used for repeat or one-off payments.
The payment gateway manages all recurring logic	No	Most gateways only process transactions. The billing schedule is usually handled by your app.