Calendar Billing

ABOUT

Some businesses want flexibility in billing customers on a specific billing date, regardless of when one signs up for a recurring service. This helps in streamlining the revenue operations of the business and bringing a sense of predictability.

TEAM

Research and Insights

Key Insights

Customers weren’t sure how calendar billing worked on Chargebee. They were concerned that they could break other parts of the experience if they set it up on their own.

Customers would fill out a Typeform request, which would then be subsequently looked into by customer support. Enabling a customer entailed writing a lot of custom JSON and using a backend tool. Understandably, this wasn’t scalable.

With a lot of back and forth between the support team and the customer, it would take 7-10 business days for enable a customer.

Product Goals

Make calendar billing self-serve, so that customers can enable this themselves and reduce time to operate

Support SaaS and subscription e-commerce businesses equally well

Productise custom implementations into a standard set of flexible configuration options

Supported Use Cases

Ability

SaaS

Ecommerce

Site-wide calendar billing

Unified handling of calendar billing across all plans / products offered by the customer

Plan-specific calendar billing

Some plans offered by the merchant can have unique calendar billing settings

Prorate charges

Adjust bill charges based on period of use

Standard billing

Set recurring billing based on weekly, monthly or yearly frequency

Event based billing

Handling new subscriptions or changes to subscriptions

Consolidate invoices

Consolidate charges for 2 billing period into 1 invoice if a subscription is created too close to the billing day

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Delay billing by ‘x’ billing cycles

Lets the customer start using the product for certain number of billing cycles before billing

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User flow

We explored how we might want to sequence the flow of configuration in a way that it felt intuitive, logical, while keeping scalability in mind.

Final Designs

SaaS, site-wide calendar billing

A SaaS business can decide to have one unifying mechanism to handle billing, irrespective of when the customer signed up for a subscription or altered a subscription

E-commerce, site-wide calendar billing

An e-commerce business, which ships products to subscribe on a recurring schedule can have one unifying mechanism to handle billing, irrespective of when the customer signed up for a subscription or altered a subscription

SaaS, plan-specific calendar billing

A SaaS business can decide to configure only certain plans to follow a specific billing schedule

E-commerce, plan-specific calendar billing

An e-commerce SaaS business can decide to configure only certain plans to follow a specific billing schedule

Results and Impact

This was initially launched for 3 merchants, who didn't report in any issues

The support team was pleasantly surprised that we were able to roll this out in a self-serve manner

This feature is set to be launched on 2000 test sites, 870 live sites and for 650 current customers