The Ultimate Guide to Choose Subscription Billing System in 2024

Choosing the right Subscription Billing System

Billing is the backbone of your subscription business and choosing the right subscription billing system for your business is a challenging and time consuming process. You need to consider both your current as well as future needs. Even replacing the existing billing systems down the line also requires planning and proper coordination. Using a subscription billing system that works out of tune with your pricing model or needs can lead to lost income and frustrated customers.

To select or replace the subscription billing system, you need to know the solution that makes the transition easier. From the many billing systems available in the market, you need to do research and identify the right vendor who understands your business challenges, capabilities, and limitations – considering the expertise they need to have across your business. Remember, no two businesses are the same. Therefore, the billing solution you go for should address your critical business requirements and should be flexible enough to mold as needed.

Making the wrong decision can lead to Lost income, frustrated customers, and your organization mark down the drain. The importance of the billing system should not make you feel scared. Instead, look at this as an opportunity to do proper analysis and make an informed decision that will positively benefit you for years to come.

The best subscription billing system for you works flawlessly so that you can focus your efforts on your own business. However, if they start to cause issues and you ignore it, the faults will grow to a massive scale and can cost you a ton of money and time down the line.

1. Automated Payment Processing and Tracking

Payment Collection from customers is one of the tedious processes. There are a few telecom billing software companies in the market like jBilling which are highly reputed for developing advanced invoice billing solutions capable of managing huge customer data. These solutions also keep reminding the customers about the payments they need to make, giving you the flexibility to manage offers, special discounts, bundles, packages to the individual customer and comes with features that help you to provide bundles, packages, offers, discounts to customers.

2. Ability to Customize

Your business is evolving. Your existing subscription billing system may not be able to adapt to the ever changing requirements of your business as per market scenarios and hence stop you from implementing many ideas and processes that will help you in taking advantage of new market opportunities. This can result in poor customer billing experience and ultimately a threat to your subscription based business. A disruptive billing system with modern technology which is completely customizable can keep a track of your package, discount, tax, and offers and prepares the invoice after considering all this. So go for the one that can be customized as per your business needs and takes your business to the next level.

3. Handling Complex Account Structures

For every business, nothing is more important than your customers. They are common in nature but yet each is unique, so organizing them most effectively is challenging. The right billing system should give you flexible options to create account types and complex parent-child account structures so you can tailor settings at multiple levels. The system should support global standards and things like currency, language, date & time zone, credit limits, payment type, notifications, and invoice presentation can be applied and manage at the account type level to gain efficiencies. 

You should be able to offer something unique to every customer as each customer may have different requirements. It is recommended to give options to your customers to adjust and customize billing at the individual customer level, so you can offer special bundles and discounts for better customer experience.  Go for a system that will not just help in reducing your customer complaints but will improve your customer experience and satisfaction.

Moreover, the system should provide such features with which a user can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel customer subscriptions. The customers should not feel “locked up” in a particular package. When you enable customers to manage their service consumption and billing, it will save your time and reduce billing support queries.

4. Flexible Integration

If you already have an in-house application or any ERP solution in place that is unique to your business model, adding a new billing system may not work the way you expected. Integration with legacy systems is usually getting difficult with most subscription systems. Therefore, you need the right billing system that will be easy to integrate with your business applications.

Apart from this, look for a vendor that should offer a robust API that can be used for various in-house custom functions. The vendor should be a strong player in the domain and should have worked with different types of systems that enable the vendor to offer standard integrations. Through the development of a plug-in, and the use of complete API. Prefer the system who provides you standard integration connectors as a part of the platform, it will save your time and increase accuracy.

5. Safety of Customer Data

It’s a huge responsibility to keep your customer’s data safe and secure and make sure it should not be misused. Most of the customers use online ways to pay the bills, so you should be very careful about the safety and security of customer data. In terms of safety, every Billing system should have robust security measures inbuilt. Every business should understand that It is not only your ethical but also professional duty to keep your customer details secure and confidential. Using Highly secure telecom billing software systems with advanced technology to keep your customer details safe, will ultimately help you in winning their trust. So, fulfill your professional and moral duty by having the right one for your business.

6. Globally accepted Standards

Globalization is not only the term it’s the easiest way to grow your business in all directions and make your customers easy to reach to you. There are multiple ways by which you can globalize your business-like 

• Multi-language: The system should provide templates in different languages for customers in different geographies. It can be user-facing documents, including emails and invoices, etc.
• Currency: The system should be capable enough to handle different currencies while dealing with prices, bills, and invoices.
• Date/time representations: The system should allow the user to select a specific date and time zone as per his geography. And it should also do the needful changes automatically as per set standards.
• Taxes: The system should smart enough to respond properly during taxation according to the different regions.