Recurring Billing – It’s More Than Just Charging Over and Over

In many cases recurring billing is simply making the same charges to the same few customers over and over. There are many low-cost solutions that can handle those situations. However, most dynamic, growing and enterprise level companies and software platforms need greater flexibility. Due to the infinite number of situations that can arise, recurring billing can become very complicated. To that end, we have developed a sophisticated payment technology infrastructure which is flexible enough to allow a business to be prepared for whatever may come.

Committed And Uncommitted Billing

The first item to consider is how you engage with your customers. With uncommitted recurring billing, the customer is not bound to a particular time commitment, which means no collection action needs to be taken if the customer stops paying. For example, if you have a news or dating site subscription and stop paying, your service is simply discontinued. At that point you can choose to update your payment method or no longer use the service. The business owner can choose whether to try to recover your business or not. Committed recurring billing involves things like cell phone contracts and gym memberships. In these scenarios the customer, via a signed contracted, is obligated to pay for a specific term. If an account becomes delinquent, the service can not only be discontinued but your recurring billing solution needs to make collection attempts so that the past due amount can be recovered and the account reinstated.

Flexibility For All Payment Schedules

Another variable is scheduling the payments. If you run a membership site or gym, you might bill your members at the beginning of each week, month, a specific date each month (like start date) or year. When payments occur on a regular basis there are several different schedules to choose from. These include:

• A fixed or term payment plan where an amount is agreed upon and a number of payments is set.
• Pay-as-you-go or unlimited plan. In which case payment continues on a regular basis until the service is cancelled by the customer.
• Hybrid, rollover or extended schedule where an initial contracted number of payments is agreed to after which billing can continue at the same or a different rate unless cancelled.

Some businesses and software platforms operate on irregular payment schedules. If you accept debt repayments, for example, those payments by be arranged on several specific future dates that are arranged with the client, like after payroll or when they get their tax refund.

A Full-Featured Solution Is Available

There are many other variables that could influence a businesses billing schedule with their customer. You need a payment infrastructure that’s flexible enough to meet your current needs and to quickly adapt to changing recurring payment behavior as a result of market changes or decisions by company leadership. For example, you may want the ability to freeze, reschedule or delay payments. Perhaps you want to allow prepayment in certain scenarios. If your recurring billing solution is inflexible, your company will become inflexible and won’t be able to meet your customer demands. We specialize in enterprise payment technology, and have a robust payment platform that can perfectly fit your needs. Our technology is broad enough, with fully consumable API’s, and contains the feature set which will allow you to adapt with ease to your industry and your business. Contact us now to learn how we can solve your recurring billing issues.