SaaS Recurring Billing

26 February 2020- 15 min read

Saas billing software Subscription platform

Whether you’re a new business, are about to launch a subscription product, or are an existing business looking for a new billing system software solution, it’s important that you take the time to choose the right platform for your business.

Here, we’re going to look at the specific benefits and features of using Upodi.

 

What is Recurring Billing SaaS?

Before we get started, let’s clarify what we’re talking about.

Recurring billing SaaS, or automated billing SaaS, is a tool that allows your business to take recurring payments, for example from customers who have subscribed to your service or product.

Recurring billing SaaS is useful whether you’re selling an SaaS service yourself, or a physical product such as magazines, food, or health and beauty products.

As the SaaS sector continues to grow, there is an increasing number of SaaS billing platforms available for businesses in all industries to choose from in order to manage recurring payments and customer focused metrics.

Here at Upodi, we provide an exceptional level of automated billing as a service and want you to use our platform to provide a market-leading, and we hope perfect, subscriber experience for your customers.

How Will Using Upodi Benefit Your Business?

 

Overall Business Benefits: Growth, Flexibility, and Efficiency

Our SaaS billing software is designed so you can model your subscription exactly how you need to based on your customer profile.

If you’re right at the beginning of your journey as a business, our billing system software will help you to build and will grow alongside you. Likewise, if you’re already an established brand and will have many subscribers from day one of the launch of a subscription product, we’ll plug into your business and be ready to help you provide your customers with an incredible experience.

From day one, with Upodi you will be able get visibility over crucial business metrics that will help you to drive the growth you’re looking for. Whether you want to understand how you are performing in the context of monthly or annual recurring revenue, are looking to understand customer lifetime value, or want to get a grip on customer churn, you’ll have full visibility of all these performance metrics and more.

As you grow, you will be able to use Upodi as you wish to flexibly adapt your subscriptions and optimise them for your customer needs and to beat your competition.

Finally, Upodi’s SaaS billing platform will dramatically reduce the time you have to spend on administrative tasks, ensuring you can deploy your resources more effectively and maximise your business’ productivity and profitability.

How Your Business Benefits Financially When You Use Upodi

Choosing Upodi as your billing software solution will benefit your business financially by:

  • Providing you revenue reporting and projections based on your subscriber numbers, helping you to keep on top of cash flow and other financial metrics. When you have a view of what is going to be coming into your business in the coming months, you can subsequently make plans for reinvestment or other business activities. When your future revenue is predictable, business feels much easier!
  • Ensuring you get more of the revenue into your business account that you’ve worked so hard to earn.
  • Diligently ensuring compliance to data protection and privacy legislation both across international borders and to any industry-specific benchmarks and standards. You can trust Upodi to help your business keep your customer data safe.

Technical Benefits of Using Upodi

We understand how stressful plugging a payment gateway into your website can be. That’s why Upodi has been built by skilled developers experienced in combining SaaS platforms with payment gateways and API’s. We also provide a range of software development kits so your own developers can build custom features on top of the system we provide, to truly tailor the payment process for your customers.

Perhaps the biggest technical benefit of using Upodi calls out to one of the biggest overall benefits: we can grow when you’re ready to grow!

When your business grows and you need to handle increased subscriber numbers, recurring payments, transactions, and customers looking to manage their accounts without needing to contact you, Upodi scales up alongside your needs to ensure you continue to deliver exceptional service to your customers.

 

6 tips for choosing a subscription billing platform

 

Features You’ll Benefit from When Choosing Upodi for Automated Billing

Now that we’ve shown you the main benefits of using Upodi for your automated billing needs, let’s explore the additional features that will make your experience of using our platform a positive one.

We’ll help you to take care of every element of the customer lifecycle, from the moment they subscribe to any free trial throughout what will hopefully be several recurring payments to your SaaS platform.

Billing, Invoicing, and Payments

Upodi allows you to model your billing however you wish in order to fit your overall business reporting structure, particularly if you’re working with specific SaaS accounting and revenue recognition models. Assign value to your subscription plans in retrospect, upfront, as a one-time value or as the recurring payments happen. Choose the automated billing model that provides you with the insight you need to make informed decisions about future strategy and growth, or to present to potential investors in your company!

Our system will take care of all automated payments, ensuring that cash is delivered from your customers’ bank accounts while invoicing them appropriately at each billing period.

You can even use Upodi for price overrides for specific customers, for example if you’re incentivizing them to stay or compensating them for a previous issue, or simply to adjust your pricing and tiers as your business grows.

Upodi will prove particularly helpful to your business if you’re in the early stages of your SaaS journey or about to scale up. Our platform allows for easy “Grandfathering” of pricing - where you increase the price for new customers while keeping current customers on their existing subscription plans - to ensure that you are fair to your loyal subscribers while getting the correct value out of your pricing model for the products and services provided you provide.

 

Coupons, Discounts, and Trials

Free trials, from anywhere from 7-days up to a month, are commonplace in the SaaS sector as well as in other subscription-based industries.

As well as managing your trial period and activating billing at the end of the trial, Upodi will monitor usage and conversion rates based on how many of your trial subscribers make a payment and become full-time subscribers. If your product or service has a “Freemium” option, we’ll also help you to understand how many of these users become paying subscribers, or if the maintenance needed for these users is potentially something you need to address.

In addition to trial management, you can use coupons to run exclusive price campaigns and use discounts either in general or for designing a specific pricing structure for that huge client you’ve been trying to sign-up for months!

Omni-Channel Billing & Changes to Subscription Plans

As a SaaS service provider, it’s unlikely that all of your revenue is going to come from one place. Upodi manages this seamlessly, ensuring that you can take all your payments through one gateway no matter the source.

When your customer wants to move up to a more premium subscription or has decided that they’re going to downgrade, our system manages that, too. We’ll automatically adapt the billing and invoicing appropriately, leaving you to focus on working on your customers and meeting their expectations.

Account Holds & Customer Cancellations

As great as your SaaS platform is, reality tells us that not everyone will love it or find that it’s especially useful for them.

When the time comes for your customers to cancel, we’ll help you to deal with those scenarios to help increase your chances of retention or at least ensure they’ll come back to you the next time they need to use an SaaS solution. One option might be to place their subscription on hold, or even offer them a free period as a means of retaining them, both of which we can facilitate.

Security & Compliance

You have enough on your plate dealing with the integrity of customer data and ensuring that your customers’ customers are happy. Upodi’s SaaS payment processing is designed to ensure compliance with the highest international security, privacy, and data protection regulations, which allows your business to trade cross border and grow your business while we take care of all this on your behalf. As your awareness is growing across borders don't forget to ensure your online brand protection.

Ready to Start Your Growth With Upodi’s Automated Billing Solutions?

Choosing the right SaaS billing system can be a big step in helping your business to grow and be successful. 

To learn more about Upodi or to start your free trial of our subscription billing software, you can get in touch with us here.

 

About the Author

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Anne Egdal

Anne Egdal

Anne Egdal is the Project Manager at Bonzer and has a passion for SEO work, which she is also specialized in. She provide external material and advice to Upodi, that contribute to more organic traffic coming to Upodi and an important player when it comes to creating more awareness.