Subscription-based businesses experience invisible revenue losses, which can now be reduced by 30% with Chargebee’s Summer’19 update. On May 21, 2019, Chargebee, an emerging market leader in the SaaS subscription management solutions industry, released an update with improved agility, usability, security, and revenue operations across the Chargebee subscription management platform. Find out how high-growth, subscription-based businesses can benefit from the power of business intelligence and advanced automation with Chargebee.
Inefficiencies hurt the SaaS market revenue
According to a report presented by Market Research Future (MRFR), the global SaaS market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 21% and reach a valuation of about $117 Billion by 2022. SaaS businesses are witnessing a new phase of maturity. Exponential growth. Sophisticated systems. Elaborate processes. And ceiling-hitting operational inefficiencies that leak revenue across the organization. A growing number of businesses, big and small are embracing digital transformation to deal with these inefficiencies.
As per an IDC Market Survey, businesses at scale are losing up to 30% of their annual revenue to inefficiencies in their operations. That's $5.5B lost, last year alone. Launching a SaaS business has never been easier. The real challenge, though, surfaces when it scales — when the ARR crosses $1M, or when the paying customers grow over 500.
“The individual impact of any single operational inefficiency is usually invisible,” says Vikram Bhaskaran, Director of Marketing at Chargebee. “But for a fast scaling business, these inefficiencies cause them to slowly bleed out revenue without them even realizing it.”
Tracking inefficiencies behind the scenes
Inefficiency cracks pop up everywhere across the revenue cycle:
- Inefficient acquisition pipeline: Businesses are unable to capture opportunities and convert them into actual revenue (due to changing sales cycles or friction in the user experience)
- Churn in customers and revenue: Businesses are unable to manage, predict, and prevent their best customers from churning
- Leakage as the user base grows: Businesses lose millions in payment gateway processing fees, managing middleware, streamlining collections, and payment failures
- Time and effort in manual processes: Businesses still rely on manual processes, and siloed data - costing them significant time in reconciling and data collection (which could instead be spent on financial analysis and making strategic business decisions.)
Metrics get misreported. Numbers plunge in spite of soaring leads and conversion rates. More time and effort are spent fighting productivity killers rather than accelerating the growth rate. From acquisition to retention to reporting — these little things add up to a massive blow to the efficiency and in turn, the revenue.
In 2011, Chargebee entered the global SaaS solutions space. With the help of AWS's micro-instance, Braintree's IGNITION Plan, SendGrid's emails, Chargebee started off its journey of building a comprehensive subscription billing solution for high-growth subscription-based businesses.
For a bootstrapped company, AWS enabled Chargebee to create world-class software with minimal overheads. - In its first year, Chargebee's entire server load came up to 0, during which it only cost them about $100 a month. Chargebee didn't have to invest all their savings in infrastructure, and yet match their product up against large companies like Zuora who'd already earned millions of dollars in funding. In addition to that, AWS offers Chargebee a cloud platform that is built to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations and protect the system against traditional IT security issues.
Chargebee's customers receive key reports, metrics, and insights of their subscription businesses, in addition to automating their subscriptions management, billing, payments, invoicing, and revenue recognition processes, to mention but a few. At the moment, over 1700 Companies in 50+ countries use Chargebee to handle transactions in 120+ currencies.
As a subscription management platform, Chargebee sits at the core of the revenue operations stack — processing all subscription lifecycle, billing, and revenue information. And with the recent Summer 2019 update to their product, Chargebee moves closer than ever to ironing out these revenue operational inefficiencies.
SaaS becomes more agile with Chargebee’s Summer '19 update
Today, customers are more demanding. They need quick resolutions to their problems. For subscription-based businesses, handling customer queries becomes a challenge if unnoticed operational inefficiencies lead to delay in responses. Chargebee solves these inefficiencies through an automated platform that manages real-time customer support challenges for SaaS businesses. Apart from that, subscription-based businesses require solutions to manage complex processes like Revenue Recognition, as the schedules tend to vary for revenue recognition factors such as usage, revenue, and billing. And what happens when accounting rules get fiddled? The business risk escalates further. ASC 606, the new revenue recognition rule now makes the process increasingly challenging for subscription-based companies.
Chargebee’s new platform enhancements come as a sigh of relief for these businesses. The platform addresses their needs by automating revenue management and revenue allocation in compliance with ASC 606 regulations. It also allows businesses to choose from various templates and recognition methods as required.
Other new features include the introduction of Subscription Time Machine, an industry-first that allows businesses to easily test and simulate new and complex configurations, billing rules, and scheduled subscription lifecycle workflows to optimize sales and streamline the customer experience. New additions also include enhanced customer acquisition tools, new pricing models, account hierarchy, enhanced Salesforce integration, new integrations with NetSuite and Intacct ERP, upgraded usability with a redesigned User Interface (UI), and upgraded security including Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) functionality.
The advancements to the Chargebee subscription billing platform provide organizations with a new level of control to further improve the overall experience for their end users. The additions make the platform an even more complete and robust end-to-end solution that allows for quick and intelligent business decisions in real time and the ability to optimize the user experience across the entire customer lifecycle.
“Managing subscription-based business is complex, as customer demands are dynamic and businesses need agility to respond to these requests in real-time,” said Omar Nawaz, Chief Product Officer (CPO) at Chargebee. “Chargebee is focused on applying automation to optimize revenue operations from order-to-cash, helping businesses grow their revenue, at scale.”
Evolving with the changing market conditions
With the recent Summer Release, Chargebee has rolled out capabilities that allow for seamless user experience, frictionless acquisition, predictable retention, and error-free finance.
“For a product with as expansive an impact on the bottom-line as Chargebee, we were obsessed with improving revenue operations efficiency and increasing agility in the product. This is a representation of how much our customers and the market has evolved with changing demands. The Summer Release means more customers, increased LTV, more revenue, and maximized value with accurate revenue recognition & management,” says Omar Nawaz, Chief Product Officer at Chargebee.
The biggest update yet in their 8 journeys as a Subscription Management Platform, Chargebee’s Summer'19 is packaged to plug inefficiency leaks across the revenue cycle and drive no-holds-barred growth in high volume and high ACV SaaS.
For more information on Chargebee and its new product features, visit www.chargebee.com
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