Practical QA Series · Volume Four

The Subscription & Recurring Billing QA Playbook

Defects that arrive every month until somebody notices.

A coupon that should have expired after three months does not. Every invoice looks correct. It is wrong by a fixed percentage, monthly, forever.

18defects you can arm, one at a time
18checks that gate a release
81more behind them
45minutes to run the gate
Every defect is verified. All 18 were confirmed by running them — each one fires when armed and passes when disarmed. That check is the expensive part, and it is the part a generated case list does not have.

Who this is for

Anyone running subscriptions — SaaS, membership, or anything that charges on a schedule.

What it covers

Trials

No charge at any point, conversion on exactly the stated day, and the abuse paths most implementations miss.

Renewals

A period charged exactly once — and the month-end anchor problem that walks a customer's billing day backwards.

Proration

Recompute one invoice by hand. It finds more billing defects than any other single technique.

Dunning

The retry schedule, and the notification column where the recoverable revenue actually is.

Cancellation

The defect most likely to end up on a public forum with a screenshot.

Reconciliation

Money taken against money owed, checked continuously rather than at the end.

What you get

The practice sandbox

A working application with 18 deliberate defects, each switchable on and off individually. Run a case, watch it fail, disarm the defect, run it again.

That second run is the point. Most testers have seen software fail. Very few have deliberately observed what a genuine pass looks like for a specific control — which is why juniors report defects that are not there.

Python, no installation beyond the interpreter.

The playbook — 26 pages

The reasoning behind the cases. Why this domain fails differently, which checks matter most, how to report a finding so it gets fixed rather than filed, and the sign-off that turns a test run into a deliverable.

The case bank — 99 cases

A filterable spreadsheet with preconditions, steps, expected result and severity for every case. Plus a bug report template, a client sign-off sheet, and:

  • Proration reference
  • Dunning matrix
  • Time-travel recipes

The free smoke test

The eighteen checks worth running before every release. Included in the kit, and free to anyone — take it without buying.

Three cases from the bank

In full, so you can judge the rest. These are the kind that come from handling the incident rather than reading the documentation.

A coupon that should have expired after three months does not

Every invoice is internally consistent, correctly formatted, and wrong by a fixed percentage — applied to every affected customer, every month, until somebody notices.

Severity here is a rate, not an event.

The month-end anchor walks backwards

A subscription anchored on the 31st has no valid date in February. Clamp permanently and the customer's billing day migrates to the 28th and stays there, quietly shortening every cycle.

Only visible if you advance the clock through a short month.

A cancelled subscription keeps billing on the second renewal

The first renewal after cancellation is correctly skipped. The second is not. Ninety days of testing finds it; thirty does not.

This is the one that ends up on a public forum with a screenshot.

Get the Subscription & Recurring Billing kit

One download. The playbook, the case bank as a spreadsheet, and the practice sandbox. No subscription, no account.

Buy — $39International · card, PayPal কিনুন — ৳2,400Bangladesh · bKash, Nagad, card
Paying from Bangladesh? Use the second button — it accepts local methods at local pricing. International orders are handled by Lemon Squeezy, who act as merchant of record and take care of your local tax.

Try it before you decide

The live demo runs five of the checks against a simulated system, in your browser. Nothing to install and nothing to sign up for. Watch a defect fire, then switch it off and watch the same check pass.

Open the billing demo

Mohammad Ashik Elahi · ashik.elahi.cse@gmail.com · All four volumes