Simplify Events-Based Billing Product Catalog Management with the New API Capabilities

In 2020, we launched Events-Based Billing, an out-of-the-box rating engine that makes it easy to offer multi-attribute pricing like the industry titans (Think: AWS, Twilio, Datadog). Now, we’re excited to announce API enhancements that simplify product catalog management for Events-Based Billing models!

The API updates enable you to programmatically:

This new capability enables you to quickly and easily implement multi-attribute, pay-as-you-go pricing models like the example below, resulting in lower customer acquisition costs and higher net dollar retention

Cloud Data Storage - GB of Data Transferred

For more information on Events-Based Billing, head to our documentation here >

Subscriptions Index Column Editor

Over the past several months our Product Design Team has released enhancements to the Subscription Index UI so that your customer-facing teams can navigate and search for subscriptions with ease. These have included new filtering options that includes subscription groups in addition to enhanced search capabilities. 

Today we are excited to announce we have added the ability to customize columns! We understand workflows can vary from department to department or even between sites within your Chargify environment. This customization feature allows you to quickly see the information you need with pick and choose columns such as 'Signup Date', 'Period Start', 'Collection Method' and more!  

Head over to the Subscription Index UI and check it out! 

View Automatically Applied Prepayments in Consolidated Invoice History

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>


UK VAT Breakdown

The UK requires merchants doing business in the UK and invoicing in currencies other than GBP to provide a breakdown of VAT in GBP on e-invoices.  The regulation (found here) states:

You can invoice in any currency for the goods and services that you supply. If UK VAT is due on the transaction your invoices must also show the following in sterling:
  • the total net value of goods and services at each VAT rate
  • the amount of VAT, if any, at each rate
Chargify merchants who fall into this category can now add this breakdown directly to their e-invoices. Enable this feature at your site level, under the invoice settings.

For more information on the UK VAT breakdown, see our documentation here>

Subscription Filtering by Groups

Many of our customers today are leveraging the use of Subscription Groups to consolidate invoicing for their customers with multiple subscriptions. In using the Subscription Index within the UI, we are excited to announce an added filter for this subscription type!

Our Product Team has added the ability to filter between Subscription Type, now supporting three types under the 'More Filters' dropdown:

  • All
  • Individual Subscription
  • Subscription Groups

This added filter will provide your customer-facing teams a quick glance on the health of your subscription groups leading to faster turnaround time on decisions and inquiries. 

Head over to the Subscription Index UI and check it out! 

Send Multiple Invoices to Customer in One Email

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>

Subscription Index UI Enhancements

Managing your subscriptions in Chargify should be as easy and seamless as possible, from the sign-up to look-up of information on your customer base. As we look to continually enhance our UI look and feel, many of our customers recently sat down with our Product Design Team to provide feedback on how we can improve the Subscription Index UI. 

Today, we are excited to announce that we have made several enhancements that will delight our users through a more simplistic design. We have added new filtering options with an improved search capability in addition to a new 'Product' column. 

Head over to the Subscription Index UI and check it out! 

Backdate a Received Date for External Payments

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>

Include Avalara Sales Tax When Creating Price Points

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>

Immediately Charge Existing Payment Method on Ad-Hoc Invoices

In a customer-centric world, selling add-ons, services, or products outside of your recurring subscriptions can become a common practice. Because of this, we love knowing that our customers can take advantage of ad-hoc (one-off) invoices, either within the UI or API. Our Billing Team has released several enhancements to one-off invoicing over the past several months, from backdating functionality, new filtering options (via API), and a date selector modal. 

Today, we are excited to announce that you now have the option to immediately collect payment on these ad-hoc invoices. Two options are available when creating an ad-hoc invoice in the UI: 

  1. The invoice will be marked for remittance payment; or 
  2. The invoice amount will be collected automatically from the payment method on file 


In addition, users can select the desired behavior if payment fails. The ad-hoc invoice can either: 

  1. Roll back (not be created); or
  2. The status can be set to 'Open' and Chargify will attempt collection at the next scheduled renewal 

The default behavior can be set in your Site Settings. However, behavior for individual and ad-hoc invoices can be overridden. Payment instructions can be sent via API with the payment_instrucions parameter. If payment instructions are not specified, the settings for the invoice will default to the site settings.

For more information, see our ad-hoc invoice documentation or API documentation here>
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