Managing cancellations

Overview

Cancellations are part of the subscription business. Kyvento supports both paths – cancellation by your team and self-cancellation by the customer in the portal – and handles cleanly what happens to the term and any open invoices.

Cancelling a subscription (backend)

Open the subscription and click "Cancel subscription". In the dialog, you select the cancellation mode:

• "Cancel at the end of the period" (default) – the subscription continues until the end of the paid billing period and then ends automatically.
• "End immediately" – the subscription ends instantly, without waiting for the end of the period.

Optionally, you record a reason (for your own analysis) and suppress the confirmation email to the customer.

What happens to open invoices

Existing open invoices are unaffected by the cancellation – they remain due and, if necessary, go through the dunning process. A pro rata refund for unused time is not issued automatically for an immediate cancellation; create a credit note for this if needed.

Self-cancellation in the customer portal

Logged-in customers cancel their subscription themselves in the customer portal – for consumer protection reasons always at the end of the period, observing the notice period stored in the product. The cancel button on the subscription page is visible by default. You can hide it in the portal settings; Kyvento will then point out that you must provide consumers with an equivalent means of cancellation through another channel.

Cancelling without a login (Section 312k BGB)

Alongside the portal, Kyvento provides a public cancellation page that your customers can reach without signing in – linked in the footer of your checkout and portal pages. It is enabled out of the box and covers the requirement of Section 312k of the German Civil Code (BGB) for a permanently accessible means of cancellation.

You can disable the page in the portal settings. Whether Section 312k BGB applies to your business – for example with purely commercial customers or customers outside Germany – is your decision; Kyvento provides the tool and does not check this. Once disabled, customers can only cancel while logged into the portal. The switch does not affect the cancel button in the portal: the two routes are controlled separately.

Unassigned cancellations

Not every declaration submitted via the public page can be matched to a contract automatically – for instance when the customer enters a different email address than the one stored on the subscription. Kyvento collects these cases under Unassigned cancellations. Such declarations are legally effective and need to be processed, so review the list regularly.

Withdrawal is not the same as cancellation

Within the statutory withdrawal period (§ 356a BGB) consumers can not only cancel the contract but withdraw from it — the contract then counts as never concluded. Kyvento treats this as its own operation: during the period a withdrawal button appears in the customer portal, and in the backend you find the withdrawal on the subscription itself.

What a withdrawal triggers is configured on the product: whether the contract ends, whether the refund is full or pro rata, whether it is issued automatically, and whether the subscription is suspended immediately. Setting the withdrawal period to 0 days disables withdrawal for that product — common for pure B2B offerings.

On notice periods: Kyvento warns, but does not block

You can set any notice period on a product. If you choose more than 30 days, Kyvento points out that such a period is contestable towards consumers under § 309 no. 9 b BGB — it is still saved, and the warning is recorded. The decision stays with you: for different B2B terms, it is best to create a separate product.

Undoing a cancellation

As long as the effective date is in the future, a cancellation can be reversed – in the backend via "Reactivate", in the customer portal via "Withdraw cancellation". An immediate cancellation is final.

Next steps

• Just pause temporarily instead of cancelling – see Pausing or freezing subscriptions
• Tidy up cancelled subscriptions – see Archiving cancelled subscriptions