What is Agile Billing, and Why Subscription Businesses Need It

Traditional billing systems are outdated and inflexible. They heavily rely on manual input to function. This makes them lag behind in the race for quick and efficient operations. They are simply too slow to act on any new revenue opportunities that arise.

Businesses today have realized the true potential an agile billing system carries. It not only helps them meet the ever evolving customer demands, but also accelerates their payment processes. While an employee might spend hours on customer invoices, agile systems make invoicing instantaneous.

This billing system is even more crucial for subscription businesses who by nature cannot afford to rely on traditional models. They leverage agile billing to pursue monetization opportunities without facing system bottlenecks.

In this article, let us explore the system of agile billing in detail, and analyze how it assists businesses in achieving their revenue goals.

What is Agile Billing?

Agile billing is a billing model that automates a business’s key financial processes, and adds flexibility to the way they price their customers. It encompasses billing models such as recurring, usage-based, dynamic and hybrid billing.

With an agile system, businesses can flexibly implement the pricing models of their choice, and automate complicated billing calculations.

Subscription businesses require agile billing to gain a competitive advantage. With this system in place, they can set up the subscription plans that their audience demands. Customer satisfaction is pivotal to boosting revenue. Agile systems allow subscription businesses to deeply customize their offerings, add new items, and adjust billing seamlessly.

One of the most important assets that agile billing software offers is real-time data access. Subscription companies are able to track their sales, revenue patterns, customer activities and interactions in real-time.

These findings are critical to service innovation, and responding to customer needs. They enable customer communication to be personalized, making customers feel valued, and stay loyal.

The Role of Agile Billing in Optimizing Subscription Operations

Agile billing is the cornerstone of subscription operations. With every other service increasingly becoming subscription based, businesses need to offer subscription in a way that stands out from the crowd.

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For that they need a billing system that offers frictionless customer payments, customer-friendly payment options and customer information security.

These are the major features of agile billing that power flexible subscription processes:

• Automation

Perhaps the greatest advantage of agile billing is that it is automated. Automated payment processes are quick, and free of errors. They prove to be cost effective as well, as businesses don’t need to invest large amounts in human capital to manage billing and invoicing.

It also encompasses recurring invoicing. Customers are invoiced or auto-billed according to their unique subscription renewal dates. Employees do not have to chase after them to pay. The payments are made automatically through secure payment gateways.

Automation is also responsible for handling complex billing impeccably. It enables companies to provide special offers such as discounts and coupons confidently, as they do not have to manually execute each customer’s calculation.

• Customizable Subscription Plans & Pricing Models

Agile billing supports the creation of customizable subscription plans. These plans can be established creatively, without worrying about the complex billing they require. Agile billing system enables businesses to focus on offering customers what they need. It takes care of all the billing mechanisms running behind the scenes.

Similarly, it also allows smooth implementation of different pricing models. Examples include tiered pricing, volume-based pricing, demand-based pricing, hybrid pricing, and more.

Flat subscription rates are rarely appealing. Customers are drawn toward subscription plans which offer them some cost advantage, and appear budget-friendly.

For instance, plans priced according to usage. If a customer doesn’t use your service frequently, they might feel their subscription fees are going to waste. But if you offer them a usage-based plan for your service, it might encourage them to continue their subscription. Because in this case, they’ll be only paying for what they use, avoiding extra charges.

• Real-Time Data Tracking

Agile billing system supports usage-based pricing. This means that it is robust enough to track customers’ service usage in real-time. Similarly, it tracks subscribers’ billing cycles to collect their payments timely.

In case you offer discounts on certain plans, the system carries out discount billing for the predefined duration. It is agile enough to bill individual customers according to their unique billing criteria.

For instance, you might have extended different discounts to some of your customers as loyalty rewards. The system bills each customer precisely, without errors or confusion.

The system also tracks payment statuses in real-time for you, flagging unpaid and overdue invoices. Since you are notified timely, you can promptly initiate procedures to deal with such payment failures. Agile billing software also offer intelligent dunning management to recover failed payments.

• Reporting & Analytics

Businesses can do wonders with the real-time performance insights they gain from an agile billing platform. They can monitor their sales activity, and identify sales trends. They can identify which of their subscription offerings are doing better than others, and analyze why.

They can also monitor their revenue such as monthly recurring revenue (MRR), and revenue trends. They can generate comprehensive revenue reports which inform them of their peak and lowest revenue periods.

Agile systems let businesses track customer activity, and offers them insight into customers’ behavioral patterns. They monitor churn rate, and support businesses collect feedback from churned customers via automated forms.

All of these insights are precious for service optimization. Businesses can identify their strengths and areas of weakness, and create strategies for future growth accordingly.

• Revenue Growth

Outdated systems make identifying revenue leaks difficult. Revenue leakage can occur due to inefficiencies in billing, inaccurate application of discounts, payment failures, and a variety of system congestions.

Agile billing frees subscription processes from system bottlenecks, preventing potential revenue leaks. It carries out billing accurately so that you don’t lose even a single one of your hard-earned pennies.

Moreover, businesses can monitor the performance of their subscription plans and pricing models. This empowers them to optimize their prices and offerings according to the changing demands, to stay up-to-date and competent.

Additionally, when payments fail, the billing system automatically notifies customers, and requests them to update their payment details. It also retries payments until they are collected to ensure that you don’t incur losses.

• Security

Agile billing software maintain a secure customer database which stores their personal and payment information, as well as transaction history. In order to gain customer trust, it is mandatory to opt for a billing system that complies with security standards like PCI DSS.

This ensures customers that their sensitive information is safe with you. Payment data encryption prevents unauthorized access, and fraudulent activities.

Why is Agile Billing Superior to Traditional Billing?

Here are some common reasons:

1. Flexibility & Scalability

Traditional subscription billing systems do not support advanced billing models such as usage-based or hybrid. Businesses are limited to offer only a standard subscription with a fixed price. They have to deal with billing manually anyway. The less complex their billing needs are, the better.

But this restricts them from advancing, and evolving according to market requirements. Agile billing is superior as it lets companies experiment with various pricing models and subscription plans. They can optimize their billing based on past performance.

With agile billing, businesses are not afraid to set up appealing subscription offers and promotions. Their billing system has got their back. Addition of new products or service features won’t make their system crumble.

What’s more, agile billing platforms scale as the customer volume increases. Unlike in traditional systems, businesses do not necessarily need to expand their human resources as their customer base expands. The billing platform handles the invoicing of large customers without faltering, reducing administrative costs.

2. Revenue Opportunities

With agile billing, businesses benefit from revenue opportunities as soon as they arrive. They don’t have to experience revenue delays that come with rigid billing systems.

For instance, if a business wants to extend special discounts during an optimal period, agile platforms make discount implementation quick and seamless. Businesses get to seize more revenue while it’s high time to do so.

Whereas, rigid systems are most likely to complicate and delay such billing implementation, preventing companies from making potential revenue.

3. Transparency

Traditional models do not offer any insight into customer behavior. As a result, businesses fail to keep up with latest trends and customer expectations.

Agile billing systems make subscription operations increasingly transparent by providing businesses with complete visibility into their performance. They add transparency for subscribers as well.

Subscribers are notified every time their subscription renewal occurs, so that they do not feel surprised at payment deduction. Additionally, subscription prices are clearly set up and communicated with them, so they don’t feel like being charged unfairly.

Fostering customer trust by keeping subscription billing transparent and understandable is key to retain customers for a long time.

SubscriptionFlow is an Agile Billing Software that Gets Rid of Billing Headaches

SubscriptionFlow is a two-in-one solution for agile billing and subscription management. Subscription businesses use our platform to seize potential revenue opportunities and maximize profitability.

Our solutions are unmatched when it comes to flexible and automated billing. We cater to businesses of all sizes, and deliver top-notch subscription experiences that keep your customers committed.

Here’s a quick look at our agile billing solutions:

• Support for multiple billing models: recurring, usage-based, dynamic, hybrid, etc.
• Custom billing schedules
• Flexible subscription plans and bundles
• Smart dunning for revenue recovery
• Wide network of integrations
• Advanced reporting and analytics
• Support for global payment gateways

Book a demo with SubscriptionFlow today, and utilize all these features and more to make your agile billing journey a success.