Are you looking for a way to automate your billing process?
Billing has been an integral part of a business for ages. Apart from the business perspective, it also plays a crucial role in the relationship with your customers. It ensures and makes customers aware about what they are paying, how much they are paying, and when they are paying.
Online businesses take billings to a completely new level. Traditional register billings are transformed into subscription billings in the online store.
Let us understand the meaning and process of subscription billing and recurring payment solutions in detail.
What is Subscription Billing & Recurring Payments?
Subscription billing can be defined as the payment you charge to your customers for a service or product subscription.
Subscription billing can be classified into two major types –
- One-time Subscription
- Recurring Subscription
One-time subscriptions are standard billings that you charge your customer one-time.
Recurring Subscriptions or Payments can be defined as the process of billing your customers at a fixed time interval such as weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly.
Recurring billings can be used for a product subscription, service-based subscription, magazine, or anything else.
Benefits of Automating The Subscription Billing Process
Subscription billing and recurring payment solutions go hand-in-hand. The combination not only automates the billing process your customers but also saves your efforts.
Automation process handles –
1. Billings
With automation, you can automate your product billing frequency and cycle. All you need to do is to set subscriptions for recurring payments one-time, and it will automatically deduct the charges according to the payment cycle.
2. Invoices
One of the significant benefits of automation with billing is that it automatically generate and send invoices to the clients before the due dates.
It generates personalized invoices from the selected templates, so you don’t have to. You can customize these invoices further according to your requirements.
You can add a logo, company details, and all the necessary custom fields.
3. Upgrade & Downgrade Subscription Plans
If a customer chooses to upgrade or downgrade their subscription plan anytime, they are free to do so. Subscription billings will be calculated according to the new plan and their prorated usage.
4. No More Manual Calculations Hassle
It auto-calculates the charges in case of upgradation or degradation of subscription-based billings.
It also came handy in case of auto-calculation of service and usage-based plans. It saves a lot of time and effort for you and your customers.
5. Global and Tax-compliant Payments
It allows you to bill your customers globally. However, it also allows you to bill to maintain tax compliance for countries like the United States of America, United Kingdom, Canada, UAE, and Australia.
6. Multi-currency and Payment Types
Supporting multiple currencies and different payment methods are a basic necessity for a subscription-based business.
It makes sure that your online business is able to provide a hassle-free experience to your customers. This not only will encourage them to sign-up but also force them to stay with your recurring services or products.
7. Prevent Payment Failures
One of the significant drawbacks of manual payments is chances of payment failures. When you automate the payment process, it’s unlikely leads to failure until any obvious problem arises.
The problem includes –
- Card loss.
- Expired card
- Lack of funds
- Suspicion of fraud
- Card declined
- Network errors, etc.
When something like this happens, it automatically tries again in fixed intervals to renew the subscription. Apart from it, it also sends emails and notifications to the customer about the payment failure and renewal of the product subscription.
8. Prevent Chargebacks and Fraud
You can lose your capability to receive credit payments in case of exceeding the threshold limit of your credit card assigned by the issuers.
Therefore, it’s significant to handle chargebacks to avoid frauds. Avoiding frauds and chargebacks not only results in increasing your revenue but also increases customer’s trust for your billing system.
9. Secure Payment Model
Payment security is one of the crucial parts of any business. Subscription billing integrates with multiple payment gateways and methods to ease the worries of a customer.
It can be credit cards, debit cards, bank transfers, offline, etc. All online payments must comply with PCI security terms. Automation process handles this compliance and security both so that you or your customers don’t have to worry about anything such as hacking, fraud, etc.
It stores payment information securely in the system and restricts any suspicious access from an unauthenticated source by using technology advancements like SSL (Secure Socket Layer).
Wrapping Up
Subscription billing and recurring payment solutions are some of the key elements that play a crucial role in online businesses. It not only saves your effort, resource, and time but also let customers customize, subscribe, cancel, upgrade and degrade the subscription plan according to their requirements. It’s significant to level up your billing system if you haven’t done it yet.
