When it comes to providing a SaaS solution to your customers, it's crucial to have a streamlined and automated system for handling recurring billing. In this article, we'll dive into the features and capabilities of the StormHub Engine's Billing component and show how it can simplify the management of your solution's subscriptions and invoicing process. With StormHub Engine you can easily manage and automate all your billing operations and provide your customers with a smooth and easy billing experience.
Multi-currency
One of the features included in the Billing component is support for multiple currencies. This allows you to easily manage and define the currencies you want to have in your solution and assign the appropriate currency to your customers based on their country of origin. With this feature, you can ensure that your customers are billed in their local currency, making the process of paying for your service more convenient and streamlined for them. Additionally, this feature helps you to avoid any confusion or errors that may arise from currency conversion which can lead to increased satisfaction and retention of customers.
Billing items
To be able to link and track usage of the system or different parts of the system you need to set up billing items. Those billing items can be high-level, like subscription tiers, or more granular like a number of users using different parts of the solution. The component is giving a lot of flexibility in defining items that you can assign and design in the application workflows. Additionally, each item can have different pricing in a different currency.
Discounts
It’s very common for SaaS owners to give certain promotions and discounts in the process of acquiring new users or decreasing the churn rate of existing ones. These discounts can be defined in the billing component and assigned to customers and end users. As with billing items, there is a lot of customization possible when discounts are created. You can base your discounts on a total invoice or assign them to certain billing items. You can make a discount in percentage, or to be a fixed amount. If you need to make the discount automatically applied in the future, you can define a time or count limit on how many times it will be applied to one customer.
Discounts, together with billing items, are providing many customization options to support different use cases and pricing strategies, sometimes applicable even within the same solution.
Usage tracking
One of the basic and must-have requirements for SaaS subscription management is a capability to trace the usage of subscription items consumed by end users. We already mentioned that assigning and removing billing items can be done through application workflows, so that means all changes in usage are automatically applied and visible on customers’ dashboards.
Billing details and payment options
To be able to automatically create invoices and process the payment, the end user needs to provide billing details and set up a payment option in the system. Once everything is set up system will automatically take control of the process and continue to do until a payment attempt fails or the user removes billing information or if he deactivates the whole account.
In case billing details or payment options are missing or there is some other issue that appeared in the invoicing or payment processing user will automatically receive information about the issue and he will be asked to take the necessary steps.
Invoicing and payments
Having everything defined and tracing consumption for each user is the easy part, but the more important part comes when actual invoicing happens. Invoicing process is also possible to customize depending on your use cases. For example, invoicing can happen at beginning of the payment period, or it can happen at the end. It can be for all users at the same time or spread depending on when users started to use monetized parts of the solution. Once everything is set up, the system will automatically start tracking, generating invoices, and sending them to the customers.
Once invoices are sent to the customers, it is possible to have the system try to automatically charge the payment option set up by the end users.
Automated dunning
Part of the automation is also sending reminders if some billing data is missing, if payment options are not valid, or automated charge to the payment option failed. All this will be taken care of by the solution which will send reminders and notifications based on the component setup. The same is for the dunning process, if invoices are not paid on time, the system will send defined reminders and automatically take defined actions if the dunning process doesn’t result in a successful payment.
What comes next?
In this article, we presented an overview of features and functionalities which are part of the billing module. As you can see, the whole component is designed to bring necessary customization to a different use case that SaaS solutions might have when they want to offer and monetize their solution.
But we don’t want to stop here. There are many things which we want to improve, like integration of Billing component with multiple payment processors or automated country tax rules. On our roadmap is also another component which, in combination with the Billing component, will make possible for you to setup a full e-commerce solution on top of the Engine! Stay informed with the latest news and updates by subscribing to our newsletter.
If you want to learn more about the Billing component or any other part of the Engine, don’t be shy and send us an email: info@stormhub.cloud.