It’s been a hard year, but the subscription world seems to be bouncing back bigger, better, and faster than ever before. In fact, this is the quickest post-recession recovery that global businesses have seen in the last 80 years!
Of course, you’re here because you knew that already. And you’re looking to ride that insane growth wave in the best way possible.
But gearing up for growth implies setting up your tools and teams to solve increasingly complex workflows. More sophisticated sales motions. More resilient product enhancements. More streamlined financial practices. More predictable FP&A. And especially, more processes adding to the existing complexity.
Over the last few releases, we’ve been progressively building out capabilities to help you navigate all these and more. This time, we’ve packaged everything you need to get your sales, finance, and growth ambitions in full swing.
As we always say, the revenue workflow that got you here today won’t get you where you want to be tomorrow. Our Summer 2021 Release aims to make life and business easier for you by helping you conquer operational complexities.
Highlights of Summer 2021
For the CRO & RevOps: Solving for Sales Complexity
Flexible Discounting
What?
Empower sales teams by giving them the flexibility to add discounts for each merchant without defining discounts on a site level.
Why?
You wouldn’t imagine a typical day in your sales bay to involve gunslingers and cowboy hats. But almost every quarter-end sales negotiation inevitably involves a Mexican standoff between the customer, your sales rep, and Nate from your billing team. The customer wants a specific discount, your rep is ready to offer that. But Nate hasn’t created that specific coupon code yet, and so the standoff continues.
What Now?
Empower your reps with one more ammunition to close deals faster by letting them create discounts on specific line items on the fly.
You can read about our Discounting capabilities here. To enable this feature for your Chargebee account, write to beta@chargebee.com
Retune your Sales Workflows
It’s not just Mexican standoffs and whistling music in Sales Town. Soon you’d be playing “Negotiation Tennis” as well!
As you scale, you’d need to support sophisticated sales and finance processes.
Luckily, Chargebee’s Quote to Cash automation makes the entire workflow, from pricing negotiation to revenue recognition, seamless. So your sales team can obsess over closing deals while your finance team focuses on closing books.
With the powerful one-time, recurring, flat, and percentage discounting capabilities, and deep CRM integrations that let your reps manage subscriptions right from within Salesforce, Hubspot, Pipedrive, and more, the new Flexible Discounting capability completes the package to smoothen every negotiation.
But wait, there’s more.
You don’t have to put all the sales pressure on your reps. If you’re already running a product-led acquisition flow or considering a self-serve model, Chargebee already supports buttery smooth checkout and self-service workflows. Even if you offer one-time products.
For the CFO & Controller: Injecting efficiency in Accounting Operations
Backdated Subscription Options and Invoicing
What?
Allow your controllers and operations teams to correctly record invoices by backdating them and applying subscription changes retrospectively.
Why?
Ever had an order come in right at the end of your accounting period? And had to suffer the pain of recording your revenue accurately? Or worse, explain to your reps why they didn’t receive their commissions on time?
If only you could spin up a time machine to backdate your invoices and subscriptions….
Well, now you can!
You can now set up permissions for which backdating superpowers you need. Change past subscription actions by allowing backdating operations up to a specific period and book revenue accurately. This capability also gives you an elegant solution to delight unhappy customers – by regenerating backdated invoices at a lower plan without hurting your A/R.
Coupled with Chargebee’s Time Machine, which helps you visualize the future of your subscriptions, you can now go ‘Back to the Future.’
How can it help?
While you become an armchair time traveler, Chargebee’s invoice operations help you play out different realities with refunds and credit notes, helping you understand customer behavior better. You can also deploy advanced invoices that allow payments in advance for a particular number of future terms in a subscription, maybe, a week or two before the subscription begins to accommodate any sudden hike in demand for a non-renewing subscription.
At Chargebee, we want to aid you with world-class invoicing operations capabilities. You can check out this feature here. Reach out to your CSM or mail us at support@chargebee.com to request this feature.
Email Notifications on Chargebacks
What?
An email notification can be sent from Chargebee to the customers automatically whenever an invoice is moved into an unpaid state due to a dispute.
Why?
You asked, we listened. The feature was originally launched to help you manage the volume of chargebacks by quickly updating the customer record with the details of the dispute. This way, you could issue a credit note, or change the invoice status to ‘Unpaid’ while settling the dispute. To further automate the process and play a role in dispute resolution we have introduced an automated email notification that will be sent to the end customer when the invoice is moved to an unpaid state due to recent disputes.
How can it help?
There is also an option to configure multiple reminder emails if you received no responses from your customer. You can configure the optimal number of reminders you’d like to send to the customer, even in their own language to see if they wanted to reconsider, make payment for the outstanding invoice and continue using your service/product.
Expanding Global Footprint
Worldpay Gateway Direct Integration
What?
An integration with Worldpay, a global payment processing gateway, helps scaling businesses expand faster into US, EU, and APAC regions without worrying about the local compliance regulations.
Why?
We believe that when you are focused on growth, nothing should come in your way, let alone your payment gateway. The EU market has a fair share of regulations and requirements like 3DS2, GDPR, sandbox accounts for testing, etc. With our direct integration with Worldpay, you can now process global payments with one account, avail 3DS support, aid international payment methods starting with cards.
Worldpay is a global payment gateway with customers majorly from UK and EU. Its latest merger with a leading payment processor helps with its rapid expansion in the US and APAC.
How can it help?
Chargebee supports recurring payments in 150+ countries with the most popular regional payment gateways. We have been integrating with payment gateways (Checkout.com (EU), Paypal (Global)) and adding additional payment methods (SEPA, iDeal, Sofort, etc.) to cater to the US, EU, and APAC. The direct integration with Worldpay would make international payments and help mid-market enterprises scale with ease.
You can check out the various payment gateway providers Chargebee supports here. To enable this feature for your Chargebee account, write to beta@chargebee.com
EU-VAT Tax with Intacct
What?
Abide tax regulations with ease by syncing invoices with tax information for customers who have purchased Intacct’s Tax Solution module and override tax amount by third-party systems.
Why?
The current integration with Intacct helps to sync the tax information from Chargebee to Intacct. It enables the customer to automatically submit the tax compliance report to the specific region’s regulatory body. However, If the customer has purchased the Sage Intacct’s Tax Solution addon module, then VAT is calculated in Intacct and does not allow the third-party system to interfere. Now Chargebee has come up with the ability to sync the tax information by creating the Accounts Receivable (AR) invoice in Intacct, which overrides the tax amount by the third-party system. This helps report the correct amount of region-specific tax collected to the respective tax authorities.
How can it help?
Chargebee helps you configure taxes for every region you have customers in with not just Intacct but also other leading finance software. The integration with Avalara makes it easier to weave in tax management with subscription payments. The integration with Stripe helps you import transactions straight into Quickbooks or Xero. All these integrations help bring all the relevant data under one roof and aids in clearing the information gap between the books and the bank. Chargebee’s Google plugin makes this reconciliation process as easy as a click of a button.
Check out how you can scale your business across Europe with the help of Chargebee.
Keeping it self-serve as you scale can be challenging, and at Chargebee, we want to make sure that you can empower your teams to embrace these complexities and grow with them. As William Gibson says, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet,” the saplings of the future are readily available for the ones who know where to water.
If you are already buzzing with new ideas at this point on moving into new a geography, rolling out new products or business lines, or doubling down on your current acquisition channels, we can help you bounce off growth strategies for the year ahead and help you solve for up-market sales workflows, accelerate your product-led motions and even help you rethink pricing or packaging.
It’s a matter of time and speed of execution, and Chargebee can help you hit the ground running. Reach out to our product experts for a consultation call!
