Did you know? A report by Forbes states that from 2014 to 2017, the subscription company websites observed an 800% increase in their subscriber base.

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What is Smart Billing?

Smart Billing offers GST compliant invoicing solution with recurring payment capabilities to collect payments from customers and fixed rentals especially within subscription mode.

Why Smart Billing Is Becoming More Important?

Due to the success of businesses like Netflix and Spotify, more and more companies are turning to the subscription business model to generate revenue. In the third quarter of 2019, Netflix had over 158 million paying streaming subscribers worldwide and over 5.5 million free trial customers.

Subscription models help you retain your customers, maintain your cash flow & increase the chances of expanding your customer base. With the boom of digitization, customers prefer to execute most of their activities online & that too, a hassle-less process in every online move is chosen.

Online implementation of subscription models will save your time and make life easier for your customers by simplifying the payment process.

Smart Billing is a suite of Subscription & Invoicing solutions that helps you create customized subscriptions for your customers & collect recurring payments. Also, generate customized invoices to collect timely payments from your customers.

For SMEs who charge their customers with rentals, we provide an easy-to-use, fast & automated platform to create subscriptions & charge customers according to the billing frequency & billing cycle that you make.

Easebuzz Subscriptions

Subscriptions are simply automatic payments, where a customer authorizes a service provider/merchant to auto-debit fixed amounts at regular intervals as per the decided plan. Easebuzz provides an automated, hassle-free platform to merchants. They can create recurring payment schedules for their customers, control the billing cycles and get instant alerts on subscription activities. The only thing merchants need to do is link respective plans to their customers and monitor the subscription-related activities.

With a strong CMS platform you can easily create & manage your customer and item details. You get to maintain a customer repository where you can store necessary details of your customer like – contact details, billing address, shipping address, GSTIN etc. You need to create this customer repository only once & reuse these details every time you have to create a subscription for them.

Similarly you can create an items repository where in you store all the items with details like its name, description, rate per unit, HSN & SAC code for GST. By maintaining the customer & items repository, you save time & also create subscriptions easily by selecting customer details as per the creation.

With a robust CMS platform, you can easily create & manage your customer and item details. You get to maintain a customer repository where you can store necessary information of your customer like – contact details, billing address, shipping address, GSTIN, etc. You need to create this customer repository only once & reuse these details every time you start a subscription for them.

Similarly, you can create an items repository to store all the items with more information like its name, description, rate per unit, HSN & SAC code for GST. By maintaining the customer & items repository, you save time & also create subscriptions easily by selecting customer details as per the creation.

Easebuzz Smart Billing Recurring model helps you create subscriptions such as Fixed billing & Metered billing.

Fixed Billing

In this type of billing, you can charge your customers for the items or products/services that you offer are fixed. You can set the billing frequency & the billing cycle as per the plan assigned to your customer

You create a subscription for your customer according to a plan of 1 year. So for the items/services you provide to your customer, you can set the billing frequency to collect payments from your customer. This frequency can be daily, weekly, monthly, yearly as per your choice. Have set the frequency; the next thing is to set the billing cycle count. It will determine the number of times your customer will pay you for the subscription.

For example – A car rental subscription for one year is to be made, and you want your rental to be collected every month for 12 months. So considering this scenario, you will set the billing frequency to ‘monthly’ & the billing cycle count to ’12’.

So, your customer will pay you every month for 12 times, i.e., for one year. In this way, you can create subscriptions according to your preferred billing frequency & billing cycle.

Metered Billing

In metered billing, you charge your customer according to the usage of the products/services that you have provided. The billing cycle & billing frequency for metered billing is similar to Fixed billing, as described above.

The only difference here is that you charge the customer at the end of the billing cycle, as per your customer’s usage of the items/services. So if there is a metered billing subscription for every month for 12 times, you charge the customer on the last date of his billing frequency, i.e., on the previous day of the month. You can easily add items, update the subscription according to the customer’s usage, & charge him accordingly.

How customers pay for subscriptions

Easebuzz subscriptions allow you to

Pay for the subscription via Auto debit ( E-Nach/E-Mandate) – The customer will have to complete an authentication transaction one time to save his card details. The amount for future payments of his subscription will then be auto-debited through the saved details.

Pay for the subscription (Via Link) – The customers will receive the link to view the subscription invoice & pay the total amount.

Subscription management from dashboard

You are provided with a dashboard to manage & monitor all the subscriptions you have created. Your subscriptions will have certain status depending on your activity. If you have just completed a subscription & haven’t assigned it to any customer, the subscription will have ‘draft’ as its status. Similarly, subscriptions will have groups like issued, paid, unpaid, expired, halted, canceled.

All these subscriptions can be managed from a single dashboard. You can even send payment reminders to customers within a few clicks.

Automated invoices

Swiftly create invoices online & issue invoices to your customers via email & SMS, and await payments in your bank account. Share the invoice payment links with customers & enable them to pay online.

A robust CMS-powered dashboard lets you manage your invoices – with your customers, items/services (that you provide to your customers), all your calculations with taxes, discounts, deductions, custom charges, and more. Manage all of these features from a single dashboard!

Quick Invoice generation

As your customers & items are already created, drafting an invoice would be quick. To begin, you will create an invoice number which will be a unique number for that particular invoice. Further, choose the customer to whom you want to issue to invoice. Select customer’s billing & shipping address which you entered (while creating customers in a repository)

Easy populating of line items & calculations

Add the items/products in your invoice define the quantity of the products. You can apply discounts on the price of your line items. Also, certain deductions & additional charges can be used to the final payable amount of your invoice. Once you apply your expenses, deductions & discounts, your calculations w.r.t taxes will be done for you. You can set an expiry date for your invoice to promptly expect payments from your customers with a feature to send payment reminders to be well informed about the cost.

Give your customers the flexibility to pay

Often there are situations wherein customers prefer to pay you partially. Keeping this in mind, we let you create splits on the total payable amount of your invoice. For example, if the total payable amount of your invoice is Rs.1200, you can make breaks off, let’s say Rs. 400 each. In this way, your customer will pay a total of Rs.1200 in 3 splits (Each of Rs.400 ). It will let your customers have flexibility in paying & customer retention could rise.

Issue invoice to customers.

Once the invoice is made & your splits are set, you can issue the invoice to the customer on their Email & SMS. Your customers will receive a payment link for your invoice where they will see your invoice with all the items charged & they can proceed to pay. If you have created splits on the payable amount, your customers will pay the respective amounts in splits as per the split ratio you make while producing the invoice.

Invoice Management

Every single invoice you create or issue or just draft & save is easily accessible to you from the dashboard. You can view & edit the invoices which you have made & not allocated to any customer.

Smart Billing, which is comprised of Subscription & Invoicing management, simplifies your billing process accurately, on time with ease of operations & eliminates manual reconciliation of payments to a greater extent.