Do You Need To Automate The Recurring Billing Process? The Most Convincing Answer To This Frequently Asked Question

Recurring billing translates to monthly revenue but when compared with flat fee purchases, the hassle of managing repeated transactions is in no way easier. SaaS and subscription businesses that are looking to increase their market outreach and aim to get more clients can’t afford to spend time on varying tasks that can be managed through an automated SaaS billing platform.

There are several ways to go about automating your recurring billing process. Once you’ve identified the possible billing models that you need to go for, you can program a customizable subscription management software like SubscriptionFlow that can streamline the process and provide you with all the progress reports you need any time you want.

How Does Recurring Billing Automation Work and How Does It Help You?

Subscription management systems or SaaS billing platforms are designed to provide you with convenience and ease in managing your customer’s subscription lifecycle. This innovative software provides full access to your billing details, providing you with all the details of your customers’ subscriptions and payment statuses along with business insights that enable you to launch customer-directed marketing campaigns and strategies.

Read More: Leverage SubscriptionFlow To Make Recurring Invoicing Process More Efficient

Automating your billing can help you reduce the time it takes to manage data from your subscription business, allowing you to shift your focus towards expanding your market reach. Since automation also scales with your business, you won’t have to worry about developing strategies and redesigning business models.

Managing a subscription business manually involves many discrepancies that you can only avoid if you know their details.

Problems With Manual Billing

Limited Resources Every Step of the Way

The primary benefit of going for SaaS billing software is the reduction of stress pertaining to accounting errors that don’t just take a long time when handled manually, but these errors also make the lives of everyone in the sales and accounting department a living hell.

Scaling your business and providing multiple packages will bring in bigger statements and records to go through and without automation, you’ll be spending months’ worth of time every year repeating and reconciling redundant mistakes.

Read More: How To Prepare Your SaaS Business To Go Global

Data entry errors such as duplication, entering details in the wrong account, transposing numbers, leaving a digit or adding a decimal place, turning expenses into income and vice versa, etc. are most likely made when your staff is supposed to manually enter hundreds of records into the database after checking them against a source, i.e. hard or digital form of data not integrated into your accounting or billing software. Banking issues requiring repeated communication are likely to become frustrating and the time your sales team spends on reconciling will be time lost in acquiring more customers.

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Similarly, compensating errors, errors of principle, and errors of entry reversal are all liable to be made when accountants are handed a list of entries to be inducted into the system for calculations. Even though you might have killer accounting software, you’re still liable to make these errors as the entries are inevitably going to be manual. This is because your system isn’t integrated with your payment processors (in this case, your SaaS billing platform)

Limited Payment Methods

Traditional automation or strictly manual recurring billing processing limits you to specific billing criteria as calculating variable recurring amounts and especially from various sources isn’t just difficult, it’s next to impossible. The problems that arise with processing usage-based billing models will be different for hybridized versions of it. Similarly, if accepting payments from Stripe is convenient when you’re in the US, you might face problems if you don’t have other payment gateways like GoCardless as an option. Another limitation in your model will include not offering multi-currency support for recurring billing and payment processing.

Read More: This Is How Subscription Billing Automation is a Game Changer for Subscription Businesses

The fact remains that this will inevitably result in loss of clientele, whether they’re new or existing. While new customers will seek convenience among your competitors, existing customers will become frustrated when billing errors occur and end up increasing your churn rate.

Data Manipulation and Analysis

Limited resources mean there are fewer people crunching these numbers and offering you credible insights that are vital for the expansion of your customer base. Analyzing recurring billing details of different tiers and from various payment gateways will take hours every day. Similarly, with separate platforms for managing members and managing payments, you won’t be able to observe customer behaviour as they make crucial decisions such as when they convert, leave, upgrade or downgrade their membership, etc.

Read More: Track The Data Trail Of Your Customers And Grow Subscription Business With SubscriptionFlow

Payment Reconciliation

Payment reconciliation becomes a real problem for SaaS and other subscription businesses as the MRR and ARR is affected by not receiving payments in time.

This necessitates automated reconciliation that requires smart dunning, a process that entails contacting customers and clients when recurring payments to be charged on their cards are declined or denied due to processing or financial errors such as insufficient funds in the account.

With an AI automated system, dunning may be done over a period of time with variations in the intensity of the communicated message. While the first email that is sent to your customer may notify them of the error and ask them to look into the matter, the second or the third mail that’s sent after a small duration of time (usually 2-3 days) will be more serious and formal, warning the customer that their subscription can end should they fail to process the payment. As with everything else, you can also customize every piece of communication that your system sends out and observe the real-time reactions of the recipients.

How Does SubscriptionFlow Help Your Business with Recurring Billing?

When it comes to the models of recurring billing SaaS and subscription businesses rely on, it’s impossible to imagine scaling your business, focusing on marketing and working on other avenues of expansion without automation. Whether it’s accounting errors or payment reconciliation, you can trust SubscriptionFlow to provide you with everything you need in one easy to navigate dashboard that lets you execute all your subscription and SaaS business-related operations seamlessly.

Innovative SaaS billing platforms like SubscriptionFlow provide you with cutting-edge Dunning management that allows you to set protocols that are to be followed whenever a customer’s card declines or whenever they fail to make payments in time. In fact, you can also customize how your customers or new subscribers are greeted upon their first payment and the extent of privileges they get upon subscription.

Read More: Some Effective Methods Beyond Dunning Management To Recover The Lost Revenue

Other than this, here are a few details that can highlight how scalable and flexible SubscriptionFlow is for your business when it comes to automating recurring billing processes:

AI-Integrated Business Process Optimization for Different Billing Models

What makes SubscriptionFlow unique? The fact that this is the most flexible and customizable SaaS billing platform in the market allows you to modify the software as per your business requirements. Whether your business has specific protocols to follow in certain conditions or your business model is a complex hybridization of two more billing models that aren’t readily available in other rigid SaaS billing systems, you can rely on SubscriptionFlow’s AI-integrated business process optimization to cater to your individual needs as well as the needs of your customers.

AI incorporation in an automated billing platform allows it to process crucial customer behaviour and understand how their activities are linked to their buying behaviors. Once your system gathers enough data, it can show you predictions and warnings whenever a customer is following protocols that have previously led to churns. Similarly, with the ability to customize and automate customer engagement on your platform, your AI-integrated system will also gauge the performance of your marketing strategies and pinpoint crucial times in the buying process where you can propose deals, upsells or even cross-sell a variety of packages.

Read More: AI and SaaS for Revenue Growth—Follow Our 7-Steps Guide to Automate End-to-End Subscription Management for Your Business

Smart Business Analytics

SubscriptionFlow offers you smart business analytics, which means you get the opportunity to look at key marketing insights and monitor KPIs such as customer behaviour, activities and engagement rate with regards to various sales strategies and marketing tactics that are employed by your departments. Not only will our system tell you how your buyers are interacting with your products, services or even marketing campaigns, but it’ll also highlight any discrepancies or attitudes that are likely to result in increased churn rates.

Moreover, while storing and managing your past sales data, our SaaS billing platform will work to provide you details about your buyer persona, i.e. the ideal buyer for your business. After sufficient collection is done, the system will highlight probable leads and recommend tactics to engage with these customers and convert them into recurring revenue generators for your business.

Read More: How To Manage The SalesOps And RevOps Of A Subscription Business

Seamless Integration

Our recurring billing platform is agnostic to all payment gateways, meaning we can enable you to accept payments from anywhere in the world. By integrating and embedding a variety of payment gateways, not only will you get the ability to accept multiple payments from various sources, but you’ll also be able to conduct internal payment reconciliations easily.

Finally, and perhaps the best of all, SubscriptionFlow features seamless integration of marketing tools, ERPs and CRMs that allow you to streamline all your business-related processes, all from one window. With integration options like HubSpot, MailChimp, Shopify and many others, you can be sure that incorporating these tools and platforms into your SaaS billing system will prove effective in reducing churn, increasing ARR and MRR, and landing more clients in the process.

Read More: An Incredible Variety of Integrations that SubscriptionFlow offers to SaaS Businesses

Still Don’t Think You Need Automation?

A lot of people are prone to think that automation is a utopian concept. Perhaps you think that you require a different sort of automation that SubscriptionFlow won’t cater to at first glance. Book a demo with us and let us show you that the possibilities are endless and having your recurring billing payments automated is just the first step.