In the world of subscription business, managing sundry operations is never easy. From acquiring new customers to renewing existing contracts, customizing and personalizing plans to accurately billing customers, scaling to meet growing needs to tracking add-ons and discounts – efficient management of all aspects of a subscription business requires organizations to invest in a powerful subscription management software.
The software should be able to adapt to every billing scenario and is flexible, scalable, customizable. While the obvious benefits of a good subscription management software include lead tracking, subscription management, order management, billing and invoicing, channel management, finance management, and customer service management, here are some unseen benefits that organizations can truly make the most of:
- Faster time to market: Considering the pace and scale of the subscription business growth, organizations need to get up and going almost as soon as they get into the business. A good subscription management software, with an array of critical capabilities, allows you to begin collecting revenue right away. Highly configurable and customizable billing models allow you to eliminate billing related bottlenecks – even for the most complex billing scenarios – and expedite time to market. By automating all aspects of your subscription business including provisioning, recurring billing, and revenue recognition, it enables you to rapidly make changes to meet customer demands. You can choose from multiple billing models, payment gateways and invoice options – without massive integration effort and expense.
- Automated billing: Any organization that gets into the subscription business begins by handling their recurring billing needs manually. However, as the customer base starts to increase, traditional billing systems are incapable to accurately recognize and often result in errors. A comprehensive subscription management software automates the recurring billing, invoicing and payment process to improve customer experience and reduce churn. By integrating payment processing directly into subscription billing and lifecycle management, it reduces failed and late payments. Since all billing-related tasks are automated, you can save time spent on sending out invoices and collecting payments on a recurring basis as customer and subscription plan details only need to be entered into the system only once.
- Real-time Business Insights: Every subscription business needs to know what’s happening behind the scenes. Timely access to relevant reports is a critical element of monitoring the health of the business. A good subscription management software offers a plethora of reporting features that provide important insights into business performance, customer preferences, operational loopholes, and market trends. Constant monitoring of subscription metrics through analytics, dashboards, reports, and ledgers allow you to track customer data and subscription history and get a clear picture of your strengths and weaknesses, and respond to business needs better. By understanding what’s working for your business and what isn’t, you can you make informed and strategic decisions across sales, revenue as well as leakage.
- No Revenue Leak: One of the biggest concerns for any subscription-based business is customer churn that arises due to inaccurate or late billing, payment failures, lack of communication or changes in customer data. Most of this churn happens passively, leading to revenue leakage. Switching to a modern subscription management software with finance automation and dunning management capabilities can help prevent revenue leakage, and save organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars. Since the subscription management software automates communication between your business and customer base, less time is spent chasing late payments and worrying about leaking revenue and more time towards improving business. The software automatically detects failed payments, and alerts customers about an expired credit card, pending subscription renewal, or overdue payment, etc. Such timely communication helps reduce churn, improve overall customer experience, and curb revenue leakage.
- Faster Revenue Recognition: In the subscription world, revenue recognition is particularly essential; businesses must ensure fast revenue recognition and ensure they are in compliance with the latest standards. However, for a subscription-based business, revenue recognition is always a challenge. It requires accounting for revenue across multiple contracts, billing models and subscription changes – as soon as payments come through. A good subscription management software streamlines the revenue recognition process and ensures all tasks are handled automatically – without errors – so month-end closing is hassle-free. It accurately identifies the various subscriptions, payment methods, and due dates, so businesses can grow and scale without obstacles.
Scale Effectively
In the subscription world, the priority for most organizations is to grow their business. However, a greater influx of recurring customers means that manual billing processes become tedious and time-consuming, and highly susceptible to inaccuracies caused by manual errors.
Since the demands of every new customer must be met with the highest accuracy, what you need is a modern subscription management software to eliminate the many roadblocks and curb challenges such as tedious manual processes, churn, and revenue leakage. By streamlining and automating the billing and invoicing process, it empowers businesses with the right tools needed to scale and grow effectively and deliver results quickly.
