You may have noticed a new component in the Chargify UI - the Prepaid Usage component!

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

Over the past 2 years, we released Events-Based Billing, an out-of-the-box rating engine for multi-attribute pricing, and Business Intelligence, a custom analytics suite for Chargify and third-party data. These products empower our customers to price like the industry titans (Think: Snowflake, Twilio, Datadog) and make data-driven business decisions.

Now, we’re thrilled to announce that streaming data to Chargify from your product database and favorite SaaS applications just got a whole lot easier! Airbyte.io, a no-code data integration platform, offers hundreds of source connectors that allow you to quickly and easily sync your data to Chargify. 

See this new capability in action by watching the 6-minute video below and learn how to easily deploy highly-tailored pricing models used by fast growing companies like Snowflake and AWS. 

For more information on the Airbyte integration, head to our documentation here >

Season's greetings from the entire team at Chargify and SaaSOptics! As the holiday season is upon us, we would like to announce that Chargify and SaaSOptics will be observing a company-wide Winter Break from December 24th through December 31st. Standard hours of operation will resume on January 3, 2022. 

Our support team will be monitoring for urgent system availability issues only during this time. If you believe you will need to connect with a member of our customer success and support teams, please contact us before our winter break. 

We wish you a peaceful and prosperous New Year and look forward to serving you refreshed and renewed in 2022. 

Having access to stellar product documentation is key to how you and your teams gain the most out of using Chargify day-in and day-out. Finding answers quickly when questions arise enables autonomy to quickly troubleshoot, giving our users full control. 

Today, we are very excited to announce that we have given our Help Documentation a complete refresh! The new site was reorganized to display a cleaner look with updated content, allowing for a more intuitive browsing experience. 

This is the first step in making sweeping improvements to our self-service educational resources. In the coming months, you can expect further improvements to our content as well as easier and faster ways to find the answers to your questions.

You can find the new Chargify help site here>

Consolidated invoices are a win-win for both you and your end-customer. For you, consolidated invoicing presents less processing fees when one customer pays for their multiple subscriptions all-in-one. For your end-customers, they get a single invoice for all subscriptions that they can pay for in one transaction. 

Adding to our consolidated invoicing functionality, we are excited to announce some additions to the invoice history you can call via the API. These consolidated invoices now include prepayments automatically applied to member subscriptions. When member subscriptions renew, any prepayments would apply directly to the child invoice. 

Please note that since this action was not directly on the parent subscription, the history/event for automatically applied prepayments was not previously shown on the consolidated invoice. This event can now be found for the consolidated invoice in the Read Invoice Events endpoint under the event name "link_child_payment".

For more information on consolidated invoices, see our documentation here>

We are very excited to announce that Chargify is now listed on the HubSpot App Marketplace! The listing provides another method for easily integrating HubSpot and Chargify. 

Updated in real-time, this bi-directional sync between Chargify and HubSpot is a game changer for those looking to gain efficiencies for their customer-facing teams while simultaneously breaking down data silos. Integrating your Chargify and HubSpot environment allows you to leverage all of your rich billing data in one application, bringing together sales, customer success, support and marketing teams. 

Many of our customers today are realizing the value of integrating their HubSpot and Chargify environments, as use cases span further than billing, finance, and accounting. Your sales team can easily sell, upgrade, downgrade and manage subscriptions through deals or quotes. Your customer success and support teams will have visibility to the wide array of billing data so they can seamlessly provide top-notice service to your customers quickly. Furthermore, your marketing team will reap benefits from having your billing data synced over to HubSpot where they can easily identify insightful growth churn trends that can drive data-based marketing campaigns.

Interested in integrating your Chargify and HubSpot environments today? Head on over to the HubSpot App Marketplace to download and install, or turn on via the configuration wizard within Chargify's 'Integrations' page. Need some help? Reach out to your CSM or contact us at support@chargify.com. 

For more information on our HubSpot integration, see our documentation here>

Providing a convenient, fast, and safe method on collecting payment from your customers is key to building and maintaining that recurring revenue relationship. Chargify's core functionality on sending invoices provides an easy way to both send automatic and ad-hoc invoices via email. 

We are excited to announce that we have extended our functionality to include sending multiple invoices to a customer in one email. When managing a subscription’s invoices, you can apply filters to refine the invoice selections before selecting 'Email Customer' option. You can attach up to 24 invoices in one single email.

For more information on sending emailed invoices to customers, see our documentation here>

We understand that some of our customers are entering external payments into Chargify, and oftentimes the day it gets entered is not the same day it was received. In order to support downstream reporting and align the date you received these external payments (such as paper checks via mail), you can now specify a received_on date for external payments. 

In the UI, users can provide an effective date via Invoices > Invoice Show > Record Payment > Record External Payment. The received_on date will be set to the current day by default, but the user can backdate by changing the received_on field.

For historic reporting, this field has been backfilled with the created_date date in order to facilitate reporting from this field; however, the received_on date can only be different from the created_date going forward. 

In the UI, received_on will be exposed in the /payments and /transactions pages and exports. Please note that this is the /transactions page, not the new Transactions Report page. There are plans to add this field to the new Transactions Report page in the future.

The received_on date is also available via the following API endpoints: transactions, invoice, and invoice-events. 

For more information on backdating a received date for external payments, see our documentation here>

The tax landscape for recurring revenue businesses can oftentimes be difficult to manage, leading to confusion on how to effectively apply taxes to your products and services. Adding to that complexity is determining a final price for your product that includes tax so that your customers are only advertised and charged one single price.

Within Chargify, your Avalara Managed Sales Tax account helps eliminate the ongoing headaches in managing sales tax for your recurring revenue business. Adding to Chargify's native Avalara functionality, our Product Team was recently working on a beta feature with some of our customers. We are happy to announce that this new feature is now in general availability!  

You can now utilize a 'tax included' option when setting your final prices in your Product Catalog within the UI. For example, if you want the final price (with taxes included) to be $20 for one of your subscription offerings, you can choose the "Tax included in price?" when building out your price point. Your customer will be billed $20, and in turn you will be collecting your subscription base price + tax. 

For more information on Avalara Managed Sales Tax, see our documentation for products here and for components here>