Subscription Billing is growing by leaps and bound. More and more companies use creative pricing strategies to gain competitive advantage over their competition. Look at the explosive growth of Netflix, Amazon Web Services; Salesforce, IBM Cloud. Complete business models are being eviscerated. The value proposition is evident. Businesses can maximize their available cash by opting to buy product/services on monthly payments schedule (operational expense) instead of paying upfront (capital expense).
Here are examples of company who embraced subscription pricing strategy.
- Swiftpage flagship product Act! In the 90’s was a popular Contact & Customer Manager. At that point they offered the traditional license and fixed annual software support model. Because they began to lose market share (in comes Salesforce), they were compelled to abandon and shift to a subscription model, with a more comprehensive offering to include software, services, and business integrations.
- Zendesk had used a homegrown billing system. This was popular because cloud based browser agnostic technologies became available. Their existing system could not handle the expansions, upgrades, and downgrades that customers were throwing at it. This made maintaining existing customers difficult, and the finance department was constantly tied up looking at invoices and re-updating information. Zack Urlocker, COO of Zendesk realized and said “You’d be crazy to build your own billing system. Look for a great subscription billing software solution. Their cloud-based software helps companies centralize customer support, create self-service hubs, and communicate with customers efficiently. Plenty of businesses struggle with customer service—enough so that Zendesk grew from about 5,000 accounts in 2010 to more than 45,000 in 2014.
What kinds of challenges are involved when it comes to subscription billing?
Here is an example of the complexities with multiple invoice types.
There are plenty and ever increasing factors that are under the umbrella of subscription billing.
Here are images that describe these variables; and solution strategies companies like MaxQ Technologies are offering. They call their solution Advanced Revenue Management (ARM).
John Pavain in this video explains how ARM manages subscriptions, repetitive billing, revenue recognition, renewals processing, activity billing—and manages the entire revenue lifecycle, automatically.
Here is what is included in subscription billing management stack.
Complete Flexible Product Maintenance: Easy to maintain product offerings, bundles, meters and revenue recognition rules.
Automated Customer Communication: Customers can be setup to receive invoices by email, printed or both.
Upsell, Cross-Sell, Add-ons, Rewrite: You can upsell, cross-sell, or add on products and any time.
Trial Periods: Easy to setup, offer trials to your prospects.
Contracts Management: Simple to maintain while supporting even the most complex customer relationships.
Subscription Billing is not an island but is integrated with ERP Software to achieve business success metrics.
Cloud Based Enterprise Resource Planning Software from Acumatica offers a platform that ISV (Independent Software Vendors) can integrate their solutions with. Platform tools include:
Complement:
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Why ASC is your partner of choice to deliver exceptional ERP solution including Credit Card Processing.
Please contact Jim Carroll, President Advanced Solutions and Consulting (ASC); jcarroll@solutionsco.com 2017 MVP Award holder for Acumatica leading provider of cloud Based ERP solutions. He will be glad to recommend and incremental software deployment path for your company to maximize profitability and improve cash flows.