Custom Application: Expired Credit Cards Customer Payment Manager
The subscription business model has become increasingly popular and successful with both customers and businesses alike. For customers, the ease of signing up, always having the service you require, and low hassle really makes it ideal. For businesses, the subscription model means easier to predict revenue due to the recurring nature of the model.
However, the subscription model often means more work in the accounting department. Managing recurring invoices manually is not an ideal situation especially when desperate systems are involved. Intacct, with its ability to integrate with SalesForce (CRM), recurring invoice functionality, automated revenue recognition functionality, and integration with payment processors like authorize.net and paypal (see our blog post on that here!) makes it a great fit for the subscription business model and makes managing subscription businesses a more automated process for the accounting department.
One of the challenges, however, a subscription business model faces, is that of collections. Imagine if you have a customer set on a recurring monthly payment plan, what happens if they sign up in January for a 12 month contract and the credit card they provide expires in April? Someone from the accounting department most likely will be responsible for contacting the customer and requesting a new form of payment. With thousands of invoices monthly, this can become a difficult and time consuming task. The solution? A custom application built on Intacct’s own platform, of course! The Customer Payment Manager.
Let’s go through an example of how it works!
Scenario 1 (no automation):
Step 1:
Customer A purchases a monthly plan for your services at $500 per month starting in August 2016 for 12 months. Your sales rep happily closes the deal and takes down the customer’s payment information … a VISA expiring in September 2016 (hmm the trouble begins).
Step 2:
Accounting sets up this new order in Intacct as a recurring invoice (after sales syncs it from SalesForce – see our blog post on the integration here!) and then attaches the credit card information so the monthly invoice is all set to charge the customer $500 every month, record the revenue, and the receipt. Wonderful!
September 2016: The invoice is created and payment is received successfully.
October 2016: The recurring invoice is created by Intacct, the payment is sent to the payment processor and all of a sudden it is declined.
The accounting department, hopefully having enough staff has a collections person able to run through the recurring invoices for the day to follow up on the declined transactions. However, what happens if they don’t?
November 2016: The recurring invoice runs again, same credit card that is expired, declined and let’s hope this month someone is able to follow up with the customer.
You can imagine this may keep going for several months. (Especially with thousands of recurring invoices.)
Scenario 2 (with automation):
September 2016: The invoice is created and payment is received successfully.
Simultaneously, the Customer Payment Manager creates a task for the accounting department to send this customer an email that their credit card is set to expire before the next execution date. With Intacct, these can be added to their dashboard so as soon as they sign in they see a list of emails to send!
Now, that person logs in to Intacct, sees that task, clicks the Send Email button and an email is auto-generated with the customer’s specific information requesting a new credit card.
The customer receives the email, sends a new credit card, and it is updated before the next invoice even creates in November.
Thus creating a much more efficient and streamlined process, taking the pain out of what could be a time-consuming task for a subscription model of business.
Have questions on how you can customize your Intacct instance? Have a dream to make a process more efficient and incorporate it with Intacct? Feel free to reach out to our CLA Intacct team, we would be happy to partner with you in building a customized solution that fits your business.
Kathy Jastrzebski is a manager with CLA’s Intacct team. CLA is an Intacct Premier Partner with a partnership that spans over 20 years and more than 1,000 successful implementations. Kathy brings five years of accounting experience along with seven years of Sage Intacct implementation experience. Along with her accounting experience, she has a passion for leveraging technology to lead finance teams worldwide through system implementations with a mission of increasing department efficiency through business process improvements.