And why not? It enables SaaS companies to bill their customers through various payment options and efficiently manage billing cycles and transactions. However, managing all these processes is not that easy, especially when you have many customers. Collecting customer details and tracking their subscription status, generating invoices and receiving payment, and so many things in between could be tiring. At this time, relying solely on spreadsheets and other manual methods for different processes could reduce your productivity and slow down the workflow. But don’t worry; subscription management software is all you need. So, let’s talk about this software and how it can help you!
What is the Subscription management software?
The software that helps businesses power up their product/service billing and sales based on a recurring period is subscription management software. It aims to provide customers with better services and streamlined revenue management to SaaS and other related businesses. It stores all the payment details along with processing charges to manage recurring revenue automatically. The software also makes sure you charge the right amount of fee to the right subscriber or customer in the right intervals. For this, the software is added over the one-time payment function of a payment gateway. Your products here are provided as a software suite, otherwise a standalone software or tool. It also integrates with other tools, including eCommerce platforms, catalog management tools, payment gateway, etc. However, many people get confused with other similar tools such as payment gateways, merchant accounts, etc. In reality, subscription management software or recurring billing software works on top of a payment gateway like Stripe to let them handle subscriptions while ensuring no errors happen in charging the right amounts from customers based on their plan. Similarly, a SaaS analytics software works on top of a subscription management tool that lets you analyze your MRR, churn, number of active customers, and other important metrics.
What is the need for Subscription Management or Analytics?
If you have an e-commerce store, app, delivery service, etc., that serves many customers, a subscription management system can boost your revenue. It’s because this software helps your customers to implement subscriptions easily into their preferred payment gateway. And when they sign up for any of your services or products, they easily become your customers or subscribers by entering their bank details right away and use the same information during renewals also. As a result of this convenience, ease, and speedy workflow, your subscriber base increases; besides, your fulfillment and sales team can also monitor and manage subscribers’ accounts effortlessly using the subscription management software for a smooth workflow. In addition to those aspects, the software offers some more important functionalities to you like analytics, dunning, and real-time actionable data that you can use in your marketing campaigns. As your customers advance with their subscription periods, you can also offer interesting opportunities to them such as renewals, upsells, and cross-sales by healthily following with your customers. Your outreach and marketing teams could view subscriber information along with their chosen plans to reach out to them with product tips, collect feedback, and offer special discounts. As a result of such personalized interactions, your churn rate decreases while customer engagement and revenue increases.
How to choose a good Subscription Management Software?
Choose the software that can align with your company’s goals in terms of what all services you actually need, like just subscription management or additional services like analytics, dunning, merchant stores, or all of them.The software must be scalable to satisfy the needs of your growing business.It must support customization, which helps you to adjust based on your challenges.It must be flexible enough to provide different plans you can choose to move up/down.You must be able to manage your coupons, promotions, and discounts easily with a re-activation or cancellation option.
Next, let’s discuss the best subscription management software for SaaS and other businesses that may need them.
BareMetrics
Grow your business effectively with BareMetrics that helps you with precise metrics, engagement tools, and dunning for SaaS businesses. The software displays useful insights such as activity trails, transactions, events, and numbers from the control center that help you make better, profitable decisions to advance your business. You can visualize data from the present and past and then plan and strategize for the future. Using the people insights, you can segment customers based on location and other metrics. The software helps you even to create and handle new customers manually via the subscription form. BareMetrics comes with a smart dashboard that helps you make complex comparisons effortlessly, such as numbers, dates, customer segments, and plans. Normalize charts by choosing trendiness, create business goals, add comments, and more. Use Recover to avail a dunning solution and save your business from loss due to insufficient funds, expired credit cards, bank issues, etc. It comes with tools for customizing email campaigns, paywalls, in-app reminders, capture forms, deep analytics, etc. BareMetrics forecasts help you predict the future through smart MRR projections, churn percentage, growth type, customer counts, cash flow forecasting, and more. Get email reports to stay tuned with monthly, weekly, or daily reports and track progress. Its augmentation feature allows you to merge external information with your own metrics so you can take deep insights into your business and customers. You can integrate with Zapier, Slack, import CSV files, and use their API to send additional data. There are many other features included in BareMetrics, such as segmentation, benchmarking, Slack tools, analytics API, cancellation insights, and more.
SaaSOptics
SaaSOptics is one of the leading software for subscription management designed for B2B SaaS business no matter if you are a start-up or enterprise. The software helps you automate order-to-cash, scale faster, and eliminate the usage of spreadsheets and loads of emails. With comprehensive order management, you can perform more things in less time while keeping your data clean. With its help, you can prepare accurate invoices, faster revenue schedules, and sync orders from CRM to GL automatically. Get your revenue recognition right with accuracy, on-demand, and GAAP-compliance for your loans, investors, m&a, etc. Ensure timely and efficient invoicing plus collections. The software helps you scale your invoicing process 100 times faster than manual methods. In addition to that, it saves your time spent on AR management to improve the cash flow. SaaSOptics makes it easy for you to receive payments on-time with an automated collection procedure. It also removes negligence or friction with too many emails and escalations. CRM users could easily see their account data with ARR, MRR, total balance, and create invoices giving transaction details. You get 100s of formulas and metrics to reduce the likelihood of errors and can react to board inquiries. SaaSOptics provides financial reporting for revenue, invoicing, AR, deferred revenue, etc., that are accurate and GAAP compliant for banks, investors, audits, funding, etc.
MRR.io
Track your recurring revenue every month using MRR.io no matter what payment processing service you use. They provide you with accurate metrics automatically, so your SaaS business can thrive. The features included in MRR help you calculate:
Monthly recurring revenueMRR movementNet revenue, net revenue churn, customer churn, and gross revenue churnNew, churned, contraction, and expansion MRR.Upgrades and downgradesAnnual Run Rate and refundsAverage Revenue Per CustomerPaying customersNew paying customersFailed chargesLifetime valueCancellation
In addition to these metrics, MRR.io also provides additional features such as cohort analysis, metric forecasts, multiple data sources, and advanced email reports. It supports integration with Paddle and Stripe, and there is the availability for manual data entry and APIs. The pricing structure of MRR.io consists of two plans:
Basic Plan with all the metrics explained above and allowed a maximum of 3 users and 100 paying customers. It is completely free.Pro Plan with all the above metrics, additional 4 features explained, and unlimited users and paying customers. Its pricing is $19/month.
ProfitWell
The goal of ProfitWell is to manage your subscriptions smoothly without any confusion around. Whether you need subscription reporting, free analytics, or becoming pricing strategy experts, they provide accurate services to you. As a result, it optimizes your revenue and monetization and reduces churn. Using that analytics and reporting, you can identify areas where you are already working great in addition to those where you are not strong. It helps you see the way you are positioned against your competitors with similar stages for comparison. Use their mobile app to stay notified in real-time on your Android or iOS smartphone. ProfitWell allows you to benchmark your pricing strategy and monetization health so you can improve. You can perform a retention audit to find the areas where there are a revenue leakage and the ones where you can increase your retention. They enrich data with Clearbit and Full Contact to discover customer segments driven or distracted out of subscription growth. Analyze based on location, gender, and 107+ other segments for free. Share your metrics wherever you want, and integrate with multiple platforms such as Stripe, Google Sheets, ReCharge, Chargebee, Braintree, Recurly, Zuora, Chargify. ProfitWell is secure and compliant with GDPR, so you don’t get into any legal trouble.
ChartMogul
ChartMogul is probably one of the best subscription data platforms, which is thriving since 2014. The software makes it effortless to clean and consolidate billing data and then analyze it using efficient subscription analytics. It helps you comprehend your business dynamics and visualize where you must channelize your efforts to. You can explore subscription data, including MRR, MRR movements, MRR breakdown, net cash flow, and more. Turnkey integrations and APIs help you import your revenue and subscription data into one single source in no time via an import tool or CSV upload tool, so you see everything clearly and organized. ChartMogul supports integration with Stripe, Braintree, Recurly, App Store Connect, PayPal, Chargebee, Chargify, Gocardless, Shopify, Zuora, and Google Play. Using Data Enrichment, you can add more data in ChartMogul, segment customers, and analyze the information. Bring more data using tools like Intercom, MailChimp, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Wootric, Close.io through Zapier, or create one on your own. Perform data exports to display insights and metrics when your team requires them by connecting ChartMogul with Zendesk, CSV Export, Geckoboard, Slack, Visible, etc.
Conclusion
Subscription management software has become a huge necessity for SaaS companies, and now you know the reason behind it. So, choose any of the above-mentioned services to streamline your billing, subscription analytics, and other important things and boost your revenue.
