How to Choose the Right Subscription Billing Platform for Your SaaS Business

There’s no denying that the subscription economy is on the rise.

And serve as inspiration for (new) entrepreneurs to re-imagine how they sell their products and services to the new generation of customers.

In addition to choosing the right pricing model, businesses need to select the correct subscription billing platform that supports it.

Often, this can be a daunting and challenging task for first-time and experienced entrepreneurs alike.

That’s why we want to help you understand what you need to look for in a subscription billing platform. And pick the one that works best for your business.

The Importance of a Subscription Billing Platform for Your Business

The right subscription billing platform is the lifeblood of any SaaS business. It has a massive impact on the customer experience that extends beyond the initial sign up and payment.

The platform’s primary goal is to store payment data and process charges through a range of payment options.

But also, it should help you automate the operational side of subscription management and billing - checkouts, subscriptions, invoicing, collections, accounting, and analytics.

Moreover, the right subscription billing platform should have the capability to minimize friction across every stage of the subscriber’s lifecycle. Thus, it provides a fantastic customer experience.

These are some of the reasons why it’s essential to get the right billing platform from the start.

Making the wrong decision can cost you a lot of time and money. And over time, a inadequate and unsuitable billing system can hurt or even destroy your business.

Evaluating Subscription Management Software

As we mentioned before, the subscription management software plays a huge role in the SaaS business’ success. The best and most reliable subscription platforms, in addition to the multitude of features, provide a lot of benefits too, including flexible system, robust reporting, automation of sales process, payment collection and flexible billing, information access, customer retention, to name a few.

What you should look for in a solution depends on the service you provide. But there are several standout features it should provide regardless.

Let’s go over the main points you need to consider when evaluating subscription billing platforms for your SaaS business. And of course, pick the one that’s the best for you.

Multiple Payment Gateway Options

When you run a SaaS business, it’s natural you’d want as many people using it. And that means accepting different payment methods.

A robust SaaS billing platform should be able to integrate with a range of payment gateways, allowing you to cover all fronts. And support smart routing payments for different situations.

This is also very useful in critical situations - if one payment gateway is down, you can always switch to another.

Additionally, it should provide PCI compliance and effective fraud detection and prevention mechanisms to reassure customers your website is safe, and their data stays private.

Subscription Lifecycle Management

Once a user subscribes to your service, you should be ready to handle all the changes in their customer lifecycle.

These changes should reflect their preferences, including upgrades to their subscription, pausing it or canceling it altogether.

Your business can also trigger the changes, for example, a pricing change, freemiums, and trials, discount coupons, etc.

In order to handle subscriptions, you need to use a recurring billing service that supports a variety of subscription plans that have different pricing, contract length, included benefits, or add-ons.

But also makes it easy to cancel or reactivate a subscription.

Most importantly, it allows you to track and manage subscription changes and charge the right accounts for the right amount, every month, or year.

Dunning Management Tools

In addition to being able to charge the right amount from the right account, you also need to be able to communicate with your subscribers when the billing failed and retry the payment.

Effective SaaS billing platforms usually include dunning tools that automatically retry failed payments.

Having this feature relieves you from having to manually check accounts for declined charges while automatically retrying failed payments at a time they would be most likely to go through.

At the same time, the platform sends the subscriber email notifications about declined payments or expired payment methods.

Other platforms allow you to set intelligent schedules for retrying billing failures based on specific transaction response codes and other relevant data.

Various Integrations

Running your SaaS business means using more than just your billing software.

Even though it’s a core component of your revenue operations, it needs to be able to plug into various business software such as marketing software, collaboration tools, customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, customer support software, accounting, and finance software, analytics, etc.

This way, you can make informed decisions across departments and manage all aspects of your business more efficiently.

Real-time Reporting and Analytics

Since your subscription billing software collects subscription and billing info, it can also provide deep analytics and very insightful information about your customers’ behavior.

Most platforms allow you to generate a wide range of reports concerning checkout abandonment, customer churn, retention, revenue reporting for various metrics, and more.

All of these data can help you make relevant business decisions, identify revenue-generating opportunities, and optimize your MMR and AAR.

User-level Controls

Offering users a SaaS product means that they should also have access to a platform that enables them to use it.

Your subscription billing platform of choice should be able to provide users different levels of access and even privileges depending on their subscription model.

Moreover, the software should allow you to set up internal security at different data-levels for each user, as well as secure log-ins and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).

Excellent Support

Like with any software, excellent customer support is significant – remember you are the customer in this case.

Since you, as a customer, have your own SaaS business’ customers to think about, you should opt-in for a reliable billing platform that offers a constant, uninterrupted, 24/7 support.

Highly-Responsive support can be the difference between fixing a problem immediately as it arises and losing users. And you don’t want that.

So when evaluating subscription billing solutions, make sure to pick one that will help you fix problems right away and capitalize on valuable opportunities for proactive customer engagement.

Wrapping it up

Choosing a subscription billing platform is a significant decision. And it’s essential to make the right one because using a SaaS billing software means entrusting a crucial part of your business to someone else.

You have to make sure that your billing platform of choice is easy to use and offers all features and capabilities your business needs.

When picking a SaaS billing solution, you are not only leaving subscription billing to a trusted expert, but you are giving yourself the time and freedom to focus on growing your SaaS business.

This is especially important if you are still in the start-up phase and need only basic features.

Instead of paying a high fee for a platform that offers a multitude of features that you won’t even use, try Payvoice . A platform that allows for fast and easy set-up and provides complete support of your online business. But more importantly, it can grow alongside your SaaS business.