Rerun Blog

Like everything on the internet, subscription billing is constantly evolving. We made this guide to show you how it’s likely to continue changing.

Online subscription billing is a process that allows you to streamline your billing process and help you focus on customers, by collecting payments and directing key operational tasks online.

Why should you and your business care?

This method will change the billing game for the future. It will not only provide an easier process for billing and collecting payments, but will also help you manage your subscriptions and customers. 

Use our online subscription billing guide to get a feel for how an updated recurring billing process can improve your billing workflow and why it can be a wise investment of your valuable time.

Subscription Billing

Online subscription billing will evolve through the following ways:

Wide-Range of Businesses

Subscription billing is currently utilized by a wide-range of businesses, but more and more industries will start using this form of the recurring billing process in the coming years. 

Ideal candidates for subscription billing:

Subscription services, from Amazon Prime down to a local landscaper, where customers can sign up for your service at a recurring cost.

Membership clubs for customers to automatically pay their member fees.

Utility or Internet/Phone/Cable companies that charge for monthly services.

SaaS companies, like Adobe Creative Suite, that can provide software packages to customers.

Membership websites that use subscription services to build a larger customer base.

Subscription boxes for customers to receive your products.

Fitness centers and other institutions (i.e. Martial Arts, Dance Studios) that charge a flat-rate each month.

Day cares and private schools that charge a recurring tuition to their parents.

Marketing Firms and advertising agencies that charges a retainer fee or charge a recurring monthly maintenance fee for websites and other marketing materials.

Increase Income

As customer retention becomes a priority for more and more small businesses, the value of online subscription billing only increases. 

In fact, increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits anywhere from 25% to 95%; a realization that leads a growing group of companies to the conclusion that retention is more cost-effective than acquisition.

After you pursue a subscription billing model, your revenue will become more predictable because of higher customer retention rates. You’ll be able to more accurately project revenue for a specific time frame.

Predictable earnings will enhance business stability and long-term planning to forecast future growth and earnings.

Increase Customer Satisfaction

Online subscription billing services will continue to increase customer satisfaction, as it allows businesses to implement strategic engagement strategies and target customer relationships.

Subscription billing focuses on long-term relationships with customers, rather than solely on transactions. A holistic view of the customer relatinship will help to foster a feeling of commitment and loyalty between business and customer. 

Minimizing late payment issues, as customers will be less likely to make late payments or have any late fees, will also increase satisfaction.

Save Time and Money

Switching to subscription billing will help your business cut costs, and save you time and money.

For example, if you start using electronic checks, you will be able to cut processing costs by 60%. The automated model will help you generate invoices or bills and receive payments without a significant investment of time. 

The goal is to free your time from tedious administrative tasks so that you can focus on the key drivers for your business, be that sales or marketing or operations. Recurring billing should not drain that valuable time.

Eco-Friendly

Last but not least, subscription billing will helps in shaping a future filled with eco-friendly businesses. 

Stepping away from a paper billing process and generating invoices and accepting payment online minimizes extraneous paper and waste.

Businesses will be able to:

Send invoices online 

Minimize accounting or filing problems

Receive payments online

Sync subscription billing with their accounting systems

All of which leads to a greener future for businesses and a brighter future for online subscription billing. 

If your business is looking to add online subscription billing, then schedule a demo today. We can help you process recurring, subscription, or membership invoices and payments, saving you time for more important tasks. Learn more at www.rerunapp.com.

We’ve added four small, but impactful, features that are a direct result of user feedback. Keep it coming.

Date Filter

While you’ve been able to filter Activity reports by date, the options have been limited to a handful of preset ranges (e.g. This Month). But you told us you wanted to filter with more granularity. Now use the new date filter to filter reports by any time frame, dating back to your first transaction.

ACH Payment Status

Frankly, we haven’t been able to provide the insight into the ACH settlement process that we would have liked. Until now. ACH payments now reflect one of the following statuses:

· Settling: The transaction as been processed and we are awaiting the settlement results.

· Settled: The transaction has been funded to your bank account.

· Rejected: The transaction has been rejected or returned by the customers financial institution (e.g. Not Sufficient Funds, Bank Account Rejected). You will not be funded for the item. 

Initial Fee

Many of you have shared the need to charge an upfront fee in addition to your recurring payment stream. Maybe it’s a set-up fee or application fee. Rerun now has the ability to include that Initial Fee when you create a payment stream. Simply create a payment stream, check off Initial Fee, and enter in your upfront fee.

Credits Synced to Xero

When we first integrated Rerun with Xero, Xero’s API didn’t have the ability to sync credits. But as Xero has aggressively built out their API, we’re now able to sync credits just as we do payments. When you credit a customer within Rerun, that credit will now sync to Xero. Just perform your usual sync and Rerun will create a Xero credit note.

Want to know what we’ve been working on? A makeover, of sorts. Rerun will sport a great, new look and feel, while we’ve also made important updates under the hood. We’re excited...we hope you are too. Stay tuned...

Did you know that Rerun has the capability of allowing your customers to edit their own contact and payment information? No? Okay, let us explain…

Rerun provides a “My Account” page for your customers. My Account is a hosted, secure customer center where your customers can log in and update their contact  and payment information.Once you have added your customers’ email addresses to Rerun, you can send them an email using the Customer Login Link merge tag and the Set Password Link merge tag (found on the Email tab > merge tags at the bottom). Upon receiving the email, your customers easily create a password to log in to their My Account page to add or modify their payment and/or contact information. They can also view their payment history and pay open invoices. And you can brand the page from the Checkout tab (the Styling step).

Pretty simple, right? And, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to email us at [email protected].

If you haven’t already noticed, we’ve made some changes to what was known as the Customer Center, now rebranded as My Account. Many of you have historically used the Customer Center, so we wanted to take the time to break things down a bit.

What Is My Account?

My Account is our secure way of allowing your customers to access their individual account details. My Account allows them to: update their contact and payment information, pay open invoices and view their payment history; all so you don’t have to update the information yourself.

How Do I Send My Customers There?

Pretty straightforward question, right? Well, you can send your customers there in one of two ways:

1) Merge Tags - use one of the following merge tags:

a) [Customer Login Link] – allows your customers to sign in or create an account for My Account. You would use this if your customers have already created an account.

b) [Set Password Link] – prompts your customers to set a password for My Account access. Your customer’s email address is the login.  You would use this if your customer has not yet created an account.

c) [Pay Now Button] –include the [Pay Now Button] merge tag on your invoice template to allow customers to pay any and all open invoices.. Note: for invoice billing payment streams only

2) Direct Link - share the web address for your Rerun account: (https://yoursubdomain.rerunapp.com/myaccount).

What’s My Account Look Like?

Well, it’d be silly of us not to show you if you haven’t seen it. Below are some My Account screenshots highlighting the different tabs. Remember, you can add your logo, change the header color, and add in your social media links.

If you’re in the business of accepting recurring, subscription or membership payments, Rerun might be the perfect fit for you. Most payment solutions require you to go through the hassle of applying for a merchant account, which is a headache in itself, but with Rerun, when you apply for a Rerun account, you’ll be signing up for an account with Forte Payments, which will allow you to process real, live transactions.

Other payment processors in the marketplace do not allow for ACH/eCheck billing. Rerun allows for ACH payments, as well as all major credit cards. Some would say that Rerun fees may be a bit higher than our competition out there, but remember, with Rerun, you pay only for what you process. We do not charge a monthly fee or any other fees on top of the processing fees. So while some others out there may have lower rates, they don’t offer you everything Rerun has to offer. For a quick list of what you get with Rerun, please see below:

1) Customize Email Communications and Email Automation

2) Generate and Export Activity Reports

3) Customized Checkout Process

4) Create Payment Streams and One-Time Payments

5) Prorate a First Payment

6) Set to Bill your Customers at a Frequency you Want

7) Integration with AccountEdge, QuickBooks Online and Xero

To read more about what Rerun can do for you, and why our customers chose Rerun over other competitors out there, you can visit https://www.rerunapp.com/why-rerun/

Besides the ability to process recurring, subscription or membership payments through Rerun automatically, we have now added a new invoice billing feature, where you can send emails to your customers with a pay now button that will allow them to pay the open invoice.

When you create a payment stream (i.e. payment plans) in Rerun, you’ll be greeted with the option of choosing whether you want that payment stream to be automatic or invoice.

Automatic: Payments will be processed automatically on the date(s) and frequency specified.

Invoicing: Invoices will be automatically emailed to customers on the date(s) and frequency specified. Each invoice includes a Pay Now button and login credentials to a secure, hosted My Account page where your customer can select which invoice(s) to pay.

Both allow for the variable stream option, auto prorating the first payment and adding a credit card surcharge. If you select the invoicing stream type, you’ll need to choose an invoice billing template to send out to your customers. You can choose to use our invoice template, or simply create your own.

Our automatic billing option is the same as our old payment streams. If you choose invoice billing, your customers will be emailed an invoice in which they will need to click the pay now button to complete the payment process. See below for a sample email.

You can set up as many streams of Automatic and/or Invoicing as you would like. You can also choose to have some as automatic and some as invoicing. If one stream type doesn’t work out for your business type, you can always edit the payment stream to change it to the other option.

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/before-starting-recurring-billing/

We've released a new feature in Rerun where you can now delete failed credit cards and ACH/eCheck payments. To delete a failed payment, hover over the failed transaction and you'll see a red delete icon pop-up. Click on that icon to delete the payment. Please note: The red icon will only appear when the transaction is hovered over. You can access these failed payments in four different ways.

If you click on the “View All” under the Unsuccessful Payments section on the Dashboard, you’ll be brought to a Payment Detail report, that will show all of your failed transactions. Once you hover over those transactions, the red icon will appear.

On the Payments tab, under Payment History, if you hover over any of the transactions in this section, you’ll see the red icon appear. Click that icon to delete the payments you want.

If you go to the actual customer on the Customer tab, click on the Payment History sub-tab of that customer, and for those payments that are declined or failed, you will see the red icon pop-up when you hover over that transaction.

You can delete payments in the Activity tab as well. If you click on the Payment Detail report on the left-hand side, and then click on “Failed” in the dark gray in the the upper-right corner next to Scheduled and Processed, it will show you all over your failed transactions. You can go through these to delete the transactions that you no longer want to see.

Check out (no pun intended) what we’ve added and let us know if we’re missing anything important. We’re always open to hear ways to improve Rerun. Adding a Stream Label Name: Want to add a payment plan or stream name to your checkout instance? No problem. We have added in the ability to add a stream name label, in addition to a button label and description. This gives you the ability to create a unique stream label name that is different than what you called it in your Rerun instance. The titles of your payment streams, or plans, would normally appear in your checkout process, but sometimes they do not resonate with your customers. Now for each payment stream or one-time payment option, you have the ability to add in a Stream Name Label, a Button Label, Description text and a Credit Card Surcharge. Want your payment stream “Gold Plan” to say “Deluxe Package – Best Value”, now you can. To add a Stream Name Label, go to the Checkout tab, and on the Payment Streams tab, you’ll see your payment streams listed here. Select the blue pencil icon and the details of that specific payment stream will drop down. You’ll notice the first field is Stream Name Label. Add your text here and click Save at the bottom to save your new settings. Quick View: To do this, make sure your checkout process is active. Go to the Checkout tab > Payment Streams tab. Please note: You must create payment streams beforehand to see them listed in your checkout tab.

Adding Descriptive Text on the Payment Method Page: You asked for it – we delivered. We now offer the ability to add in a description box on the payment method page of your checkout process. Don’t want to accept AMEX? No problem, let your customers know here. You can also use this textbox to payment terms in here, such as a cancellation policy. This will display underneath the payment template as “Important Notice:” as shown in the screenshots below. To do this, make sure your checkout process is active. Go to the Checkout tab and click on the Payment Method tab. You’ll see the text box to add your descriptive text here. Click Save to save any changes.