Fact: Recurring billing solutions can play a critical role for SaaS businesses trying to take a customer-centric approach.
Contrary to popular opinion, subscription management goes beyond just billing, and standout recurring billing software doesn’t just provide automated billing, invoicing, and collections, but comes with a range of other features like customer account management, data-driven insights, and deep integrations into your existing tech stack. Done right, a recurring billing solution won’t only streamline the workflows for accounts payable and receivable, it’ll also help your organization dedicate more time to providing a better customer experience. Not to mention your customers will have a frictionless billing experience.
That said, finding the right all-in-one subscription management software to handle all this sounds like it’s easier said than done. If you’re not sure how to get started with finding the best recurring billing software for your SaaS business, this guide will cover everything you need to know.
TL;DR:
- Some of the benefits of recurring billing software (also called subscription management software) include automated recurring billing, improved customer experience, and enhanced revenue management.
- To find the best provider, start by identifying your business needs, then ensuring they provide key features like integration into your tech stack, data and analytics, and customer management.
- Make a shortlist by checking independent reviews and speaking to industry peers. Carefully check the pricing model to ensure there are no hidden fees, like with Stax Bill’s transparent, all-in-one recurring billing solution.
Understanding Recurring Billing Software
Also called subscription management software, recurring billing solutions helps SaaS businesses handle their subscriptions and recurring payments by automating billing: not only for sign-ups, but also upgrades, downgrades, renewals, and cancellations. Some (but not all!) of its main benefits include:
- Automated recurring billing: The solution will automate billing cycles by managing subscriptions, generating invoices, and collecting funds on behalf of your business. It should implement dunning management features like smart retries to ensure your payments are received.
- Improved customer experience: A great recurring billing system streamlines billing for your customers so they can easily manage their subscriptions and won’t have to think twice about payments.
- Enhanced revenue management: With a wealth of data at your fingertips, subscription management software can function as a single source of truth (SSOT), offering improved revenue and growth through better data management, minimal revenue leakage, and bias-free decision making.
Identifying Your Business Needs
Before picking a provider, it’s important to have a deeper understanding of your business model and what kind of billing requirements you need. For example, will you expand into new territories? If so, you might want a provider with a localization strategy in place. With a good grasp of your business model and targets, you can ensure you find the best recurring billing platform for your organization.
Key Features To Look For in Recurring Billing Software
While there’s no one-size-fits-all solution that works for every SaaS business out there, you should make sure your subscription management solution has these key features:
- Payment processing capabilities: This is a no-brainer, but your recurring billing solution should accept a wide range of payment methods like debit and credit cards, ACH, digital wallets, and whatever other payment options your customers regularly use. Make sure it offers revenue recognition and easy integration to a payment gateway of choice.
- Integration with existing systems: Ensure you can integrate your new solution into your existing tech stack (like Quickbooks or Zoho) to optimize your workflows, ideally through a single API so you can get to market ASAP.
- Customizable billing cycles and invoicing: Prorated billing should be non-negotiable, so you can easily and fairly bill your customers for only the days they’ve used your service.
- Security and compliance: Minimize the possibility of nefarious players exploiting your security vulnerabilities and protect your business’ and customers’ (financial) data with a provider that guarantees PCI DSS compliance.
- Analytics and reporting: Real-time analytics will help improve retention, reduce churn, and grow your cash flow sustainably—not through a gut feeling, but hard data. Your best recurring billing software should obviously have the ability to pull data by customer—but that’s not all you need. Intelligent recurring billing software allows businesses to add custom fields that can be reported on. Creating additional tracking codes for different entities will mold reporting more closely to your business structure. Additionally, while it’s helpful when billing software has a sleek user interface that makes reports easy to understand, data isn’t always helpful if it’s trapped in the platform.
- Flexible catalog structuring: There are so many different ways to bring products to market. Between product types, add-ons, services, billing cycles, and currencies, a billing platform has to have enough catalog flexibility to accommodate many pricing and invoicing possibilities. This flexibility is necessary for scaling a subscription business as it grows and the market changes.
- Customer management: Improve the overall user experience with a recurring billing provider that offers a self-service platform that empowers customers to manage their SaaS experience through a white-labeled solution.
Get more granular based on your subscription business’s specific needs
Once you’ve met the must-haves in your recurring billing software search, it’s time to dig deeper.
The subscription business model is growing at breakneck speed. Your business’s ability to adapt and navigate the rapid pace of digital transformation determines its future viability. You need more than just software to manage customer subscriptions—you need a real revenue optimization engine.
Evaluate your business’s place in the market and figure out what special features may be “nice to have” for others, but game-changers for you. These might include things like:
- email and/or text notifications
- support for A/B testing
- contract management
- reseller management
- integrations with software like an ERP, CRM, and taxes management, or
- highly robust API.
Researching, Shortlisting, and Evaluating Potential Software
With the above criteria in mind, start your hunt for the best platform that meets your needs. Do some online research, then speak to industry peers and contacts to get their insights and experiences with platforms you might want to use. Also, check what customers have to say on independent review sites like G2 or Gartner.
Once you have a shortlist, reach out to the recurring billing platforms you’re most interested in for a free trial or demo. Some questions you should consider include: How easy is the platform to use? Does it have the potential to streamline your billing process and help you scale your SaaS business? Is the platform customizable to your brand?
After you’ve tried it out, inquire about pricing models: are they flat-rate, usage-based, or tiered? Make sure you have complete understanding of the total cost of ownership and any hidden fees (such as overage or cancellation fees). Ideally, choose a provider that’s fully upfront with their pricing and have a straightforward billing model, and ask them if they’ll charge you if your business experiences faster-than-projected growth during a billing cycle.
Implementing and Onboarding Your Recurring Billing Provider
Once you’ve chosen your new provider, it’s time to transition to the new system. Your new recurring billing provider should assist in migrating the data and integrating their billing system and payment gateway (if applicable) with your products, and provide an onboarding program with access to trainings and resources both for your team and your customers. Make sure to have regular check-ins and involve all relevant departments from your organization—so just not Finance! That way, you’ll be set up for long-term success.
Once you’re onboarded and using the new subscription management system, it’s not over just yet: it’s important to regularly discuss performance metrics and sales KPIs with your Account Manager to make sure you’re reaching the full potential. Oh, and make sure you’re open to feedback from your customers, internal stakeholders, and your recurring billing provider; that way, you can continually optimize your platform to offer the best experience for all users.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Now that you know what you should do, what should you not be doing when looking for a new provider?
- Overlooking hidden costs: It’s not uncommon for payment processors to sneak in hidden costs like start-up, verification, or PCI compliance fees. To avoid this, ask up-front if they charge these fees and read reviews for more information.
- Ignoring scalability needs: Don’t choose a provider that only meets your needs now; ensure they can grow alongside you (and that their pricing model meets your budget).
- Failing to involve end-users: Listen to the feedback and pain points of your customers using your current recurring billing solution, and make sure you take that onboard. Otherwise, you may lose out on valuable revenue due to customers’ dissatisfaction with your billing system.
The most essential thing when evaluating billing software is proof of concept
You can shop around and read about your options all you want. However, at the end of the day, you won’t know which billing software works best for your subscription business until you put it to the task.
The best thing you can do, then, is test out the most promising platforms. Ask for a trial account or sandbox and input actual business data to see what the billing software does with it. Create API workflows as part of this test.
And call sales engineers, if available, to learn how to make the most of tools or overcome hurdles.
This testing phase takes time, but it’s worth it.
Testing prevents you from investing in a bad-fit platform, and lays the groundwork for when you find the right one.
It’s also crucial to have some understanding of the post sale customer support provided by the vendor.
The best recurring billing software is multifunctional and customizable
The rules on perceived value are changing. Your subscribers want software partners: products that grow alongside them, pushing traditional, one-time purchases closer to obsolescence as digital transformation moves to the forefront.
Subscription companies are uniquely positioned to thrive in this market, especially as digitization and big data rapidly expand.
Modern, adaptable recurring billing software allows subscription businesses to make payments, accounting, and other recurring billing functions a breeze to boost cash flow and incite business growth.
Finding the best recurring billing software for your business requires looking past just flashy, “sexy” features and UI, and digging deep into what will actually work to positively transform your business. It requires testing things out and seeing whether or not there are workarounds to any gaps discovered.
Don’t rush the process; take the time to do it right, and you’ll never have to shop for a billing solution again.
Wrapping Up
A great recurring billing platform offers more than just billing: it ensures collections, provides integrated solutions and data, and empowers your customers to take more control of their billing experience. In short, it’s customer-first, and provides efficiency gains throughout your entire organization.
Enter Stax Bill. We handle automated subscription and payment services for your business, and ensure full compliance, so you can work more efficiently, recover more revenue, and even collect more on your invoices.
Discover the Stax Bill difference today and ensure rapid growth for your business. Contact us for a demo.
