When you’re in business, time is money. You don’t want to spend your valuable time re-billing clients each month for your subscription billing business. Automating administrative tasks is the best way to operate your business more efficiently. Want to gain more time and less stress? Read on to learn how to choose the best recurring payment system for your business!
What is a recurring payment system?
A recurring payment system streamlines and automates your subscription billing process – they take the multi-step process of billing and condense it so that you don’t have to invoice, collect, track, and analyze payments manually. As you research the software system options, consider the following to hone in on what your business needs:
Company Size – Larger companies need more customizability and options
Customer Size – Do you have a high volume of customers with relatively low prices, or fewer customers who pay for more expensive or custom plans?
Pricing – Consider whether you offer discounts, upgrades, or coupons with your products or services
Subscription management
You need to have a flexible system that caters to user’s preferences. For instance, businesses need to be able to scale their offerings depending on what consumers are requesting. As the business grows, pricing change can occur. Recurring payment systems need to be able to conform to a business’s growth easily.
Special promotions
Businesses frequently offer special promotions, such as discounts and coupons, to garner more interest in a product or service. These promotions are only available for a limited amount of time. A well-implemented automatic recurring payment system will be able to handle several promotional types and timelines
Bulk operations
An efficient and the best recurring payment system needs to be able to allow you to make immediate changes to all invoices. For instance, if you change the price of your offering, this can be easily adjusted with a well-designed system. Compare this with manually adjusting each client’s invoice to reflect the change.
Branding
Branding is most effective when it’s consistent, and this requires it to be included on the invoices and payment page each client sees. It adds a layer of professionalism as well as credibility. Consistent branding throughout the payment process reinforces the relationship between client and company.
Methods of payment
Offering a variety of different payment methods to your customers is excellent customer service. It means your business values a client’s preferences. Moreover, customers who are subscribing to a product or service want to choose their preferred method of automatic recurring payment so they can permanently “set it and forget it.”
Dunning management
The dunning process is the term for payment retry after a failure. If you have a high volume of transactions, this is imperative. It automates customer notification, keeps track of the failures, and lets customers retry more efficiently.
Integration and taxes
Your recurring payment system should be able to link with any accounting software you’re using. Since it has the most accurate information on income earned through payments, it makes sense that it should supply this data. Moreover, it should also be able to calculate the correct sales tax based on what region of the U.S. or world you’re in.
PCI compliant
The Payment Card Industry Digital Security Standard (PCI-DSS) ensures that a customer’s financial information isn’t stolen. The recurring payment software you use needs to be PCI compliant to keep your customer’s data safe. If your recurring payment software doesn’t offer this, you’ll need to do it yourself, which can include costly audits.
Being PCI compliant includes:
A firewall to protect cardholder data
Changing default passwords
Avoid recording card data outside the payment terminal
Transmitted cardholder data across public networks needs to be encrypted
Malware and anti-virus protection is installed and up-to-date
Restricted access to cardholder data
System access is authenticated and recorded
Restriction of physical access to systems
Up-to-date security policies for all employees
Service
Last but not least, your recurring billing software needs to treat you as a valued customer. This includes staff that helps with the onboarding process, consultations with specialized staff, and prompt and courteous customer service. Your recurring payment software is integral to the operation of your business – you need to be able to trust the company you’re working with when troubleshooting issues.
The best recurring payment system for your business
As you can see, the best recurring payment system is going to be able to grow with your company. It’s flexible, easy to use, and includes a variety of options to truly customize your offerings for customers. Customization includes the aesthetics of branding and presentation, to operational changes such as user privileges, promotions, and payment types.
The benefits of best recurring payment system and recurring payment software are numerous. If you’re ready to integrate one into your business, schedule a demo with us today! You’ll see how our customizable and easy-to-integrate recurring billing software can benefit your company firsthand.