Subscription Billing & Revenue Operations for Fast-growth B2B SaaS: Chargebee

A good chunk of all the digital and physical services we use today are subscription based. Dollar Shave Club or Birchbox at home. Slack, AWS or LinkedIn Premium at work. A food or salad subscription for lunch at the desk. Spotify or iTunes for a workout. Gmail for work emails. Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime Videos to wind down. SaaS companies, media outlets, education portals, eCommerce sites and many other businesses see the value of turning one-time customers into recurring subscribers. Adopting this pricing structure has led to big changes in the way they build revenue, often providing more stability and confidence in their projections. And when recurring revenue spurs growth, retention becomes one of the most-watched metrics in a business and subscription management comes into stronger focus. But what exactly is subscription management? Every business that has a subscription-based pricing structure keeps track of customers, processes payments and cancellations, records buying history, sends invoices at the right time, triggers payment failures, and much more. But it’s not necessary that one solution service all of this. The relationship between your business and your customer is no longer transactional. It is continuous. This makes the relationship a constant work-in-progress. This continuous relationship is built with your core offering - product or service - as the foundation of your business. But there are additional components that are critical - like billing. Four friends - Rajaraman, KPS, Krish, and Thiyagu - started Chargebee in a room in Rajaraman's apartment in Chennai, India in June 2011. The goal was to build a company together. They took a while, but finally found their calling in subscription management. By January 2013, the first customers had started using the Chargebee billing platform.

Operations for Recurring Billing

Rules are great when you’re trying to streamline your subscription finance processes. When should you bill which customer? How do you calculate prorations? What exchange rate should you be factoring in when you collect payments from Elbonia? But the tougher part is in enforcing them. Thankfully, Chargebee lets you automate your entire recurring billing engine. That way, your revenue operations aren’t tied to babysitting your finance rules. Flat-fee pricing model? Check. Pay-as-you-go? Check. Super complex mix-of-everything pricing model that dynamically changes every time a user called John visits your website? Kinda check. The ease of creating, managing and collecting on your subscription plans could throw a smile on your lips. But the total control you have on scores of different invoicing operations? That’s like a finance ops fantasy. It’s Always about the Little Things in Finance Ops. Because it’s all those tiny drops of frustration in Finance Ops that add up at the end of the month. Like processing refunds, promotional credits, reversing taxes, and let’s not even get started on reconciliation. Negative Invoices are so yeesh. Chargebee lets you handle refunds, adjustments, coupons, or any kind of promotional credits with elegance. And how about a chrome plugin to help you reconcile payment gateway statements on Stripe with your accounting system in just the click of a button? Yup, Chargebee does that.

Subscription Accounting and Revenue Management

Whether you use Xero or Quickbooks, NetSuite or Intacct, Chargebee syncs right into your accounting solution. Plans, addons, discounts, payments, refunds, bad debts and even ad-hoc charges - all automatically synced into your financial tool of choice. And all that, with GAAP-compliant SaaS revenue recognition and deferred revenue reporting. Oh, and if you’re worrying about complying with the latest accounting standards in your next quarterly report, you have it all already. Nobody likes a leak. Not in their bathtub, and definitely not in their subscription revenue. SaaS finance analytics reports in Chargebee give you 50+ reports on Billing, Receivables, Leakage, and Transactions. With the AR aging report, overdue invoice recovery breakdown, and Revenue Leakage summary, you can easily identify the source of leaks and clogs, and fix your recurring revenue plumbing.

QUOTE-TO-CASH AUTOMATION

There's a dark, scary place where a majority of your deals go to gather dust while your competitors continue to press their case. And it's situated somewhere between your sales desk, finance, and the legal table. With Chargebee and your CRM, your quote-to-cash function is fully automated. Different types of customers require different types of sales flows. High touch, low touch, assisted sales, or complex cycles involving sophisticated deal desks. Your sales team should be focusing on closing deals - not managing workflows. Chargebee helps you build the operational plumbing for your sales team to manage the entire process.

Krish Subramaniam, CEO

“At Chargebee, we deeply understand subscriptions, compliance, security and payments. We bring simplicity to a complex, every day, problem.”