Component Dunning

Subscription businesses are prone to failed customer payments from time to time. Having an effective dunning strategy can help prevent churn and is important in resolving customer's failed payments swiftly. Within Chargify, you have the flexibility in tailoring your communication approach, in addition to the pre-built templates, for your customers entering the dunning process.

Today we are excited to announce a new feature added to our dunning functionality. Introducing mid-period component dunning! This new feature allows for failed mid-period component allocations payment to move a subscription into dunning. This allows your customer and team to be alerted to any issues with a mid-period allocation payment.

For more information on dunning strategies, see our documentation here>

Customizable Emails for Upcoming Renewals

Without a bulletproof subscription renewal process, your customers can experience unexpected charges, questionable renewal tactics, and ultimately churn. To better delight your customers, Chargify's renewal emails keep your customers in the know of upcoming subscription renewals, as well as the added option to update/change their payment profile and plan(s).

We are happy to introduce new customizable upcoming renewal options for these email communications. This new feature allows you to customize renewal email timing, in addition to specifying which product price points an email should be triggered on.

For more information on upcoming renewal email settings, see our documentation here>

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>

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

New Filter Options via API for Invoicing

Last month we released a new endpoint to send invoices via API to mimic the behavior of the "Send Invoice" button within the UI. This endpoint enables you to programmatically deliver ad-hoc invoices as well as the re-send of auto-generated invoices, thus giving you control of when to send out an invoice.

As we continue adding new API endpoints, we are excited to announce new filter options on exposed event types on an invoice. You can now filter for multiple event types on an invoice (e.g. issue_invoice, apply_credit_note, refund_invoice) using a comma separated list. Previously, you were able to filter by only 1 invoice event.

For more information, see our documentation here>

Reactivate Subscriptions with Prepayments and Service Credits

Sometimes customer subscriptions need to be reinstated after being cancelled. Instead of creating a brand new subscription, our reactivation functionality allows you to reinstate a subscription with the following options:

Start a New Billing Period
Resume Billing Period
Collect Any Outstanding Balances
Include Trialing Period

In addition to those listed above, we are excited to announce that our Product Team has added new options for you to adjust how this reactivation gets paid by allowing for Service Credits and Prepayments to be selected.

When this option is selected, any Service Credits and Prepayments on the subscription will be applied to the reactivation charge before attempting to use the customers' payment profile.

For more information on reactivating a subscription, see our documentation here>

Updating Invoices with Customer Record Changes

Sending an invoice with incorrect customer information causes pain for both your end-customer and your team through added confusion, delays in payment, and possible brand damage. With Chargify, you never have to send an invoice with outdated customer information due to our latest enhancements to invoices in the UI!

As you produce new invoices in-app, you will now see an indicator on every open invoice letting you know if the customer information has changed since the invoice was issued. If your customer information has been changed, there is a clickable link for you to select so you can review the changes we detected and apply them to the invoice.

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

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.