Customer Billing System

There are many kinds of customer billing: recurring, by usage, prorated, in-arrears. The key to customer satisfaction - and a successful subscription business - is to have a customer billing management system that automates your billing and gives customers what they want, how they want it.

So what can your customer billing software do for you?

• Support your (changing) pricing structure - You should have the flexibility to do pricing your way. This means that you can bill your customers for any period of time (monthly, annually, etc.), use any milestone to officially start a subscription, rate customer usage per specified time period or in real-time, adjust billing dates according to whatever specifications you choose!

• Bill for complex accounts - When your customer has multiple offices, they don't usually want to get multiple bills. Your customer billing management system should allow you to roll-up recurring billing, payment terms, and other billing preferences.

• Improve your invoicing - Your invoices are the only communicating piece you can be sure that your customers are reading. This makes them your most useful piece of marketing collateral. Don't waste this opportunity. Your customer billing management system should enable you to send accurate and clean invoices so that customers understand exactly how they're being billed and for what.

• Speed up billing operations - With a flexible customer billing management system, you can group customers together. With customer groups, you can set up rules for each group and automatic billing schedules.

• Eliminate bottlenecks - Customers want to have the ability to make changes to their own subscription accounts. Whenever a customer changes their subscription -- whether they upgrade, downgrade, etc. -- their billing will be impacted. Your system should be able to automatically handle these new calculations and pro-rations so their billing keeps pace with their subscription in real time.

• Simplify tax calculations - Taxes. Everyone's favorite! To keep compliant with tax regulations, it's a great practice to pull real-time tax calculations for every invoice. Your customer billing management system should either be able to do this or have the ability to integrate with an external tax solution that can provide this up-to-date information.

Want to learn more about subscription billing management? Get a free copy of our 7 Subscription Billing Mistakes to Avoid e-book!