Business Intelligence: Widget Naming and Filter Enhancements

Giving your stakeholders an easy way to interact with your dashboards empowers them to better understand the data and make impactful decisions across the organization. Our Product Team is continually working on enhancing charting functionality within Chargify Business Intelligence. 

We are excited to announce three new additions to dashboard settings, the ability to name your filters and date pickers, and an easy way for users to clear all dashboard filters. 

Naming Your Filters
We have added the option to name the filters on your dashboards. This will make it easier for users to know exactly how the filter will impact the connected charts.

Naming Dashboard Filters


Naming Your Date Pickers
We have added the option to name the date pickers on your dashboards. This will make it easier for users to know exactly how and where the selected date range will impact the connected charts.

Naming Dashboard Date Pickers


Clearing All Filters on a Dashboard  
We have made it easier for users to clear all selected filters on a dashboard with a single click.

Clearing Filters on a Dashboard

For more information on Business Intelligence, see our documentation here>

Service Credits in Billing Portal

Chargify's billing portal provides a convenient interface for your customers to update their credit card and billing details, change plans and number of addons, as well as cancel their subscription. Best of all, modifying what actions are available for your customers can be done through the Chargify UI, all without having to write any code. 

To further enable your customers ability to manage their own accounts, we are excited to announce new Service Credit and Prepayment balances to the billing portal view. Your customers will know exactly what balance already exists before an invoice is issued. 

For more information about the billing portal, see our documentation here>

Business Intelligence: Chart Enhancements

Understanding your data and communicating it clearly to your key stakeholders is crucial in making impactful decisions across the organization. Our Product Team is continually working on enhancing charting functionality within Chargify Business Intelligence. We are excited to announce new chart settings, additional data handling, and some improvements to Heatmaps. 

Chart Settings
We have added additional settings options to our charts, so you can further customize how your data is presented. The settings available will depend on the visualization type that has been selected.

  • Legend - You now have the ability to turn the legend on and off as well as deciding its placement on the chart.
  • Grids - The vertical and horizontal grids can now be turned on and off.
  • Metric Chart title - The metric chart now also has titles and subtitles in line with all the other visualization types.

Chart Settings - Legend and Grids

Choropleth Chart
Support for US postal codes: You will now be able to see your MRR data by US state when you select the Choropleth visualization type. Visualizing your MRR data by country on a world map is also supported.

Heatmap Improvements
Support for negative values: It is now a lot easier to visualize negative values on a heatmap. This enables you to identify patterns by month across the MRR movement types.

Negative Values (Churn) on a Heat Map

Backdating Issue Date on Ad-hoc Invoices

We understand that charges can occur outside of a normal billing cycle and therefore provide the functionality for you to send ad-hoc or one-time invoices. Many customers utilize ad-hoc invoices to sell services or items on a non-recurring basis to their customer base. We are excited to announce that our Product Team has made some exciting developments to these types of invoices! You can now backdate ad-hoc invoices using both the UI and API. 

If performing this in the UI, you go under Subscriptions > Invoices > Create an Invoice. There is a new input field for Issue Date in the top right of the ad-hoc invoice within the UI. The issue date will be set by default to the current date. In order to back date the issue date, you will use the date selector functionality by clicking into the Issue Date input field.

Alternatively, you can also backdate the issue date via the API with the "Create an Invoice Endpoint". If no issue date parameter is passed, then the issue date will default to the current date. If you desire to back date, you can simply pass an issue_date parameter of any date in the past.

The primary use case for backdating ad-hoc invoices is when you experience a delay in issuing an ad-hoc invoice but would still like for the invoice to be due at the same time it would have been had there been no delay. As an example, one-off usage is incurred but not charged until 7 days later and you want the due_date to reflect your standard net terms of 15 days. In this case, you could back date the ad-hoc invoice to the day the usage was incurred and set the due_date to Day 15.

For more information on backdating the issue date on ad-hoc invoices, see our documentation here>

Business Intelligence Demo Video

Over the past few weeks, we’ve highlighted the powerful capabilities of Chargify Business Intelligence and how they enable you to get a granular, 360-degree view of your business. 

Now, you can see it in action. Here is an end-to-end walkthrough video that will take you through:

  • Out-of-the-box metrics and dashboards
  • Cloning and customizing a metric
  • Creating a metric from scratch
  • Building and sharing a dashboard

Interested in getting access to Chargify Business Intelligence? Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or support@chargify.com.

For more information on Chargify Business Intelligence, see our documentation here>

Streaming in Third-Party Data with Chargify Business Intelligence

Chargify Business Intelligence enables you to stream in data from external sources (e.g. your application and tools in your tech stack) and analyze it alongside your Chargify data. You have 3 different ways to achieve this:

Adding Custom Fields

Custom fields can be used to enrich your Chargify data to enable more granular reporting and filtering of your subscription and billing data. Custom fields can be added via a few different methods:

  • Manually populate a custom field on a Customer or Subscription in Chargify. More information is available here.
  • Use our API to create and populate custom fields.
  • Use our Salesforce integration to update custom fields. Read more about Salesforce custom fields here.

Find out more about custom fields here

Using the Chargify API Endpoint Method

The Chargify API endpoint allows you to stream in any third-party data (i.e. Salesforce, Zendesk, Jira, your application, etc.) to Chargify Business Intelligence. Documentation on how to create the endpoint and start streaming data from your own applications and other systems can be found here. Third-party data streamed to Chargify becomes available to query and visualize in the same way as our built-in data sources. 

Apache Kafka Endpoint Method

Chargify Business Intelligence is built on top of the Keen technology (powered by Apache Kafka), giving you the option to connect over Kafka protocol programmatically. You can use the endpoint to programmatically stream external data to Chargify Business Intelligence over a widely supported and robust protocol. By leveraging the Chargify Kafka endpoint and stream mirroring, you can stream part of that data to Chargify Business Intelligence and analyze it with your billing data.

In the near future, we will provide tutorials on how to stream in data via this method using Airbyte, an open-source data integration pipeline.  

Interested in getting access to Chargify Business Intelligence? Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or support@chargify.com.

For more information on Chargify Business Intelligence, see our documentation here>

Business Intelligence Custom Data Exports

Chargify Business Intelligence enables you to create custom data exports, so exactly what you need is all in one place. This saves you the time of having to aggregate multiple exports together and reduces the file size, making it easier to work with.  To create a custom export, use the ‘Extraction’ analysis type. Extractions allow you to pick the ‘Properties to Extract’, apply filters, and set the timeframe. Each property can be dragged into the desired order. 

Once you have finished configuring the metric, you can preview a set number of records, download the result as a CSV, or extract the result to an email. Extractions can also be added to dashboards to serve as a drill down that provides the raw data of a chart as context.

Interested in getting access to Chargify Business Intelligence? Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or support@chargify.com..

For more information on Chargify Business Intelligence, see our documentation here>

Proforma Triggers

Proforma invoices allows for proactive communication to your customers by providing a preview of their upcoming expected billing amounts, taking away any surprises once their subscription renews. Thanks to feedback from our existing customers taking advantage of proforma invoices, we have added some exciting functionality by announcing new proforma invoice triggers!

These triggers will allow for a proforma invoice to automatically be generated on set intervals of a subscription billing cycle. These triggers will allow you to select if you want the proforma invoice automatically sent to your customer at generation. For your annual subscribers, this will provide insight into what their invoice will look like 2, 4, 6 months (or whatever time interval you choose) out from their renewal.

For more information on proforma triggers, see our documentation here>


Sharing Data from Business Intelligence

Chargify Business Intelligence allows you to share data and interactive dashboards with non-Chargify users so that key stakeholders get the insights they need. 

Sharing Dashboards 
There are two ways that you can share a dashboard outside the Chargify application:

  • Public URL:  Making a dashboard public and sharing it will mean that anyone accessing it will be able to view the data and filter it via any added Filters or Date Pickers. The data is read only. 
  • Embed HTML:  The second way to share public dashboards is by using the code snippet. For added security we recommend embedding this on web pages that have to be accessed with login credentials.

Exporting Data  
There are two ways that you can export data from Chargify:

  • Extraction: The Extraction analysis type exports the raw data from the selected data source as a CSV. You can select the specific properties to export and apply filters to reduce the number of rows.
  • Download Metric Result: The result of a Metric can be downloaded as a CSV, an Image, or JSON. This is the computed result and not the raw data. For raw data, you can run an Extraction.

Embedding HTML

Sharing a Public Link

Exporting Image, CSV, or JSON

Interested in getting access to Chargify Business Intelligence? Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or support@chargify.com..

For more information on Chargify Business Intelligence, see our documentation here>

Chargify Business Intelligence: Creating a Metric from Scratch

Chargify Business Intelligence (BI) enables you to perform custom analysis on your Chargify data and align it to your reporting framework by creating metrics. Metrics query your data based on selectable parameters and return a visualization. Chargify BI offers 10 chart types with variants (e.g. stacked, grouped, percentage) allowing you to present your data in an easy-to-understand format.

You can quickly build metrics using our Explorer tool. Simply select the analysis to perform, the data to analyze, and the timeframe for the analysis. Then, add filters and groupings to uncover the granular, segmented insights you need to drive data-backed growth.

Metrics can be saved and easily run for a real-time view of your business. Add your saved metrics to a dashboard and then securely share information with key internal or external stakeholders.

Interested in getting access to Chargify Business Intelligence? Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or support@chargify.com.

For more information on Chargify Business Intelligence, see our documentation here>
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