8 Necessities of a Complete Subscription Billing Solution

Subscription-based business is remained to prosper and revolutionized with the Internet of Things. With the industrial revolution, old-style billing solutions are started to outdate. Luckily, strong subscription billing platforms have stepped forward to the challenge and started to offer advanced features and toolsets which remain to improve with the market.

But what so special about the subscription billing platform? Eventually, it comes down to ability.

Keeping subscription businesses and different kinds of pricing models in mind, recurring billing software is built. This building needs pioneering features in the following areas:

1. Product catalog

Once upon a time recurring based, consumption or usage-based models and subscription-based business’s product management was a difficult job. Also added components such as price discounts, promotional coupons or updates made business proprietors demand flexible solutions.

In addition, subscription businesses depend upon recurring revenue forecasting to manage their funds. So, they need to robust with respect to any new product launch and price model and accounting system changes.

Ultimately, subscription businesses simply need billing solutions that can test complex catalogs and manage them once made available to customers. Some things a comprehensive recurring billing platform should be able to do in this regard are:

Any subscription-based business really need is a billing solution that manages complex catalogs. This recurring billing platform must handle things –

• Change in pricing plans• Introduction of discounts, coupons, and promotions• Can remove or add or change products and prices

2. Notifications

Subscriptions have altered the business-consumer relationship. Old-style business models revolve around pay per purchases, the relationship between business and customer ends once a transaction is complete. Subscription-based businesses should nurture a lasting relationship with customers to make sure the recurring revenue on which they depend on.

This is helpful in the hand; it is easy to get customer feedback who expect to get an advantage from sharing their thoughts and get an improved version of the product on the way. Customer communication requires additional costs.

If customer stores credit cards for recurring payments, strategically notifying them for failed payments is an act of timing and frequency. This can handle subscription billing solutions easily:

Subscription billing solutions should able to manage following notification as well:

• Contractual expire warning• Credit card expiry• Failed billing attempts• Activation & Deactivation notifications

3. Invoicing

Invoicing is another important part of product catalog management. Invoicing should clearly mention the delivered products.

In usage or consumption-based pricing models, invoicing is very important. In some businesses, they use a one-time charge on specific services or products.The presentation of charges to a customer on an invoice clearly is an important thing.

Luckily, best subscription management solutions have advanced and easy to understand invoice design tools. A perfect invoice should offer a business with different ways of using data presentation, allow any invoicing adjustment, branding on invoices.

4. Usage

Customers generate raw usage data; a billing solution should be able to manage and translate that usage efficiently. Metering and rating are important features which make sure each customer should bill appropriately based on their usage and pricing plan.

Metering: Usage data tracking according to user, account, transaction.

Rating: Payment will be determined on the measurement of rating. Some businesses charge for per hour basis while some business charges on a day basis.

The subscription business is still a developing model, so change is unavoidable. Sometimes when charges must be restructured across the complete solution for all existing subscribers, subscription billing solutions support these kinds of bulk tasks such as adding or removing products or services.

5. Finance management

Old style billing solution mainly focuses on one-time measurements such as gross profit and selling price.

Understanding of predicted revenue and costs is important to managing a recurring revenue business. Accounting solutions come with double-entry general ledger and other features are not up to subscription business needs.

Luckily, subscription billing solutions such as Work 365 are built on to the track and report all the right metrics for success.

6. BI and analytics

Best subscription management platforms should also be able to provide insights on:

• Annual recurring revenue • Monthly recurring revenue• Subscriber mix • Subscriber acquisition

The above metrics are collectively important for revenues and cost forecasting, also to testing and launch of new products. Also, subscription management analytics can offer insights to product popularity, real-time revenue, customer segments. This important data helps managers to keep an eye on a subscription business and make sure the health of the business. 7) Recurring Billing

It is obvious that subscription billing solutions have better billing features. Old style billing solutions can have capabilities such as store customer contact information or credit card information, but still, there is a need for manual input during the billing cycle.

Best subscription billing automation automates the complete billing process. They provide extra automated services connected to billing that hard to do. Such as

• Upcoming credit card expiration reminders • Card number updating for expired or replaced cards • Card payment retries for declined transactions

8. Account management

Subscription billing solutions are also subscription management platforms.This software mixes important account management tasks such as sign-up, activation, upgrades, downgrades, cancellations, and reactivations.

If you are doing business to business subscriptions, there is a capability to sort the end-user from accounts receivable when sending invoices. If you send an invoice to the wrong person, then there is no chance, it will get paid ever.

Work 365's Azure subscription billing management platform includes everything mentioned above and this solution is built on Dynamics 365 for Microsoft cloud solution providers (CSPs).