You can now automate your prepaid usage billing scenarios with Chargify!

Prepaid usage allows you to maintain a recurring, predictable revenue stream while still allowing your customers to be charged based on consumption. This is achieved through an upfront fee that is based on a quantity (or prepayment) sometimes thought of as a commitment. Your customer then draws down against their commitment. Once their entire commitment amount is used up they are charged overage fees at a ‘burst over’ rate..Overage charges are then calculated and included in your customers regular billing cycle and invoice, this allows you and your customer to maintain a single source of truth on what they are consuming and being billed for.

With prepaid usage, your customers' prepaid amounts can 're-up' every month (I commit to 50 server hours each month) or can extend out for longer periods of time (I commit to 550 server hours for the year).

Companies often move to prepaid usage models because they can incentivize their customers to increase upfront commitments or prepaid quantities, by offering a reduced price point for prepaid units or an increased rate for overage units. It is also possible to allow your customers prepaid quantities to expire or roll over to a following period.

Our Chargify prepaid usage functionality also supports your revenue and accounting compliance needs. As your customer consumes their prepaid amounts, Chargify tracks their consumption for appropriate revenue reporting and recognition. This is all handled with a single component in the Chargify system, reducing the complexity of setup and maintenance for your team.

To turn on prepaid billing model support in your Chargify environment, contact your Customer Success Manager or the Chargify Support team. 

To learn more about the prepaid usage billing model, see our documentation >

It is now possible to sell in multiple currencies within a single Chargify site! This change greatly reduces the overhead you experience from selling internationally!

With Chargify’s new multi-currency functionality you simply specify what currencies are available on each of your sites, configure your pricing, and allow your customers to sign up for products and services in those currencies. No more managing multiple sites or multiple product offerings (as required by some billing systems) just to achieve multiple currency support.

Setting up you Chargify Site for Multi-Currency

Once multi-currency is enabled, simply select which currencies you would like on your site. Chargify will leverage currency exchange rates (FX) for reporting and optional price conversion. When specifying your selected currencies, it is important to select which FX rates you wish to use. You can either input your own FX rate per currency or choose to have Chargify maintain the FX rate on your behalf. If you choose Chargify to update the FX rates, the Chargify system will use ‘Open Exchange Rates’ to update all required FX rates on an hourly basis. 

When setting up your site, you will also be asked to specify your sites default currency. This currency will be the bases for the FX conversion and will also be the currency for all site reporting.

Multi-Currency and Your Product Offering

Once the currencies are specified at the site level, you are able to define your product and component level pricing. Product Catalog currencies are defined within the price point. This eliminates the requirement for Product bloat or catalog proliferation just to support different currencies. With currencies at the price point level, you can specify specific prices in each of your supported currencies. Alternately, you can set your base (default) currency and choose to use FX to calculate the prices in your other currencies. 

When setting up your pricing per currency, we recommend setting specific prices rather than leveraging the exchange rates. Setting specific prices eliminates any FX related pricing fluctuation and ensures stable prices for the life of your contracts.

Multi-Currency and Your Customers

Now that your product catalog is configured, customers can simply subscribe to your product offering in their desired currency. Each subscriptions currency will now be set at the time of subscription creation and cannot be changed. It is, however, possible to have subscriptions with different currencies under the same customer account. This is very impactful when selling to a single organization across geographies and cuts down on a massive amount of overhead when managing your customer base.

Multi-Currency and Your Reporting

Much like cross-site insights, the specified FX rates will be used to transform all revenue and payments into the base currency for reporting purposes. Which FX rate used is based on your site configurations.

To get multi-currency turned on for your site contract Chargify support or your Customer Success Manager.

For more information on how multi-currency works, see our documentation >

PSD2 has created a lot of chaos in the billing world. Some banks weren’t ready, some businesses weren’t prepared, and some countries even pushed the deadline.

We’re happy to report that our team was able to meet the September 14th deadline and already have a number of customers that are using the updated 3DS workflows to be PSD2 compliant.

Over the past few days, we’ve increased our 24/7 on-call team to address any customer needs that pop-up and will continue this throughout the week until we ensure that any merchant needing compliance is compliant.

A big shout out to our support and development teams who have been working around the clock to help our merchants make the transition!

The second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) takes effect on September 14, 2019. To help your business better prepare, we've put together a blog post that answers the most common PSD2, SCA, and 3DS questions.

Questions such as: What is it, who is impacted, how does it work, and what is Chargify doing to ensure compliance in a post-PSD2 world?

Revenue recognition reporting has moved from a nice-to-have to a necessity with the new ASC 606/IFRS 15 accounting standards that will be in full effect next year.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve acquired ProRata to deliver cutting-edge revenue recognition automation without the burden of complicated, labor-intensive reporting.