Tag Archives: Recurring
3 major signs that indicate it’s time to Automate your Recurring Invoices within Dynamics 365 CRM/Power Apps!
What’s the one factor common to all businesses and holds the most value? Yes. Money. Majority of businesses are focused on sales and revolve around using their Dynamics 365 CRM to bank in more sales. They want to use it to its full utility to capture their leads, convert them, and continue to service them. However, the same numbers are not reflected when it comes to taking action for optimizing the process of carrying out the sales for their customers. This changes when a simple-to-use and efficient solution like is introduced.
Recurring Billing Manager, now available on , is an app that makes billing a piece of cake. It is a mix of automated intelligence, bulls-eye accuracy, as well as time and effort saving convenience. How do you know if you really need a solution like this? We’ve identified the top signs that indicate a reason for concern and a demand for change. Have you noticed the below signs?
Sign #1: Multiple Billing Schedules prove to be a burden
The biggest question with multiple clients in your billing pipeline is figuring out and organizing when each of the clients has to pay and exactly when the bill should be scheduled. This can prove to become a management nightmare if payments start to slip. But this is old worries with Recurring Billing Manager. Recurring Billing Manager provides Flexible Billing Schedules that change the way you deal with bills.
Recurring Billing Manager gives you the control of billing schedules: set which invoices should be generated, when they should be generated, how frequently they should be generated and what line of items should be a part of the new Invoice.
That’s not all; you can create multiple Billing Schedules and customize them. You can use the common billing attributes such as billing length, frequency, reminders, delayed charges, and even include multiple products as per your requirement. Using this feature of Recurring Billing Manager, seeing multiple bills will only make you happy.
Sign #2: Payments are delayed
A growing company always has limited attention time. When the workload gets heavy or the company has a major upcoming project that needs more eyes, it’s common to have operations like billing that does not stop work fall behind. With Recurring Billing Manager, Reminder Schedules takes care of this for you by sending payment reminders to your clients. You can set up a schedule for reminders with respect to invoices that are past due or for upcoming renewals. What’s more is that every Reminder Schedule will have Reminder Rule(s). These rules outline when the reminders should be sent, the email templates to be used, to whom it should be sent, etc.
So, you can now channel your focus to more pressing tasks while Recurring Billing Manager automates your reminders for you.
Sign #3: Inaccurate/Zero Compensation for Delayed Payments
Let’s be practical. Receiving a cleared invoice right on time through all clients is seldom the case for many businesses. Along with this being an inconvenient situation, it also adds a time and effort consuming overhead to the team for calculating the penalty charges.
With Recurring Billing Manager’s Delayed Charge Schedule, the penalties are calculated automatically for you. You can create a schedule for the delayed charges that the customers must pay for their overdue invoices. The UI is made simple to use so you can simply choose parameters like the percentage of penalty, its frequency and from when it should be charged, and you will be given the calculated penalty.
This helps you to be accurate in your calculations every time and ensures that the additional time doesn’t go to waste. This also eliminates any room for bargaining from clients to wiggle out of paying calculated overdue as sales people have a claim that the systematic and automated generation of penalty is out of their control. Compared to manual control, this allows representatives to deal with difficult situations by simply relying on the automated process of penalty generation.
Did you notice any of these signs in your business? If yes, then don’t wait anymore! End the year with a resolution to make your processes more optimized and your time better utilized. Here’s even a free 15 days trial for you on our or to try it before you buy it. If you would have us assist you in any way, you don’t have to think twice before contacting us at crm@inogic.com.
So, until the next time – try Recurring Billing Manager and make it the last bill you generate manually!
Inogic acquires Dynamics 365 CRM apps for tax calculation, recurring billing and payment reminders from Rockton Software
We are glad to share this news with our community friends that we have recently acquired three value added apps from Rockton Software that will assist in the billing and tax calculation for Dynamics 365. As you know, accounting within Dynamics 365 CRM is something that organizations have been craving for since long and thus with the acquisition of these apps automating recurring billing and subscription in Dynamics 365 CRM will be made possible and thus enabling our Partners to improve productivity and offer end-to-end solutions for their clients.
The motto behind acquisition of these apps was to provide complete accounting and billing solutions to sales and service industries under the header of our organization. We were already offering accounting services to the industries with QuickBooks integration, however, these three apps can also perform standalone using custom entities to record transactions. The apps acquired by us are – Software Management, Tax Processing and Recurring Billing.
Let’s delve deep and understand how these apps function to improve Dynamics 365 productivity:
It was developed keeping specifically VARs in consideration. This apps manages software billing and license management and also works for any organization that tracks monthly billing. It also offers flexible billing schedules, payment reminders and penalty calculation. Apart from this, it also helps in automated invoice generation at the click of a button. Also, it helps in sending invoices to entire Accounts Payable team or a single contact.
As Dynamics 365 users always crave for a feature to calculate tax within CRM, Tax Processing has been developed to calculate taxes right within CRM. This automation of tax calculation enables calculating taxes whenever a new quote/order/invoice is created. Taxes with Tax Processing can either be manually or with AvaTax from Avalara. This eliminates the manual calculation of tax and ensures accuracy while calculating taxes.
With Recurring Billing Manager the process of billing can be automated with support for creating billing on daily, monthly and annual billing plans. Invoices are automatically calculated for billing plans and overdue for invoices are created along with penalty for unpaid invoices. With flexible and automatic billing schedules, the task of billing is streamlined and made easy for the users.
Thus you have seen how with the help of these apps we will be able to incorporate accounting and billing in our CRM. With these apps the users can act more freely without the stress of calculating taxes manually, scheduling bills at intervals or generating invoices/penalty.
So it’s now time to get going quickly. Download the apps for a free trial of 15 days from the links mentioned above or email us at crm@inogic.com for a quick demo.
The need for Collecting Cash Fast to build a Successful Recurring Business
Accounts Receivables processes can take up valuable time and energy in any organization. This is why “Collecting Cash fast” is one of the key metrics for building a successful recurring business. Very often the longer it takes to collect cash the higher the risk of collecting that cash correctly. You need to ensure that you are collecting the payment as quickly as possible.
Work 365 supports the typical billing frequencies – Monthly, Quarterly, and Annual billing. Some of the data we see with users of the application and the billing frequencies:
More than 70% of the invoicing is on a monthly basis. Monthly billing is the most common way of billing CSP and cloud services. Annual billing tends to be used by ISV’s and other solution providers that bundle their products or package their solutions through CSP.
Collecting cash through automated systems lowers the risk of non-payment, and reduces your DSO (Days of Sale Outstanding).mUsing manual processes like check payments is not practical for monthly payments. Typically, you want to keep your DSO to 30 days and lower than 7 days for monthly billing contracts.
, maintains the schedules for your billing relationships and using the integrated payment solutions can provide a convenient way to collect cash either through credit cards or direct debit solutions through Global leaders in payment solutions like Stripe, Authorize.net, and GoCardless.
The video above demonstrates how you can leverage these integrated payment providers directly into Work 365.
So, what’s your DSO? Let us know your thoughts to discuss these options.
Managing Business Credit Risk for CSP and Recurring Billing with Work 365
Payments at Risk
Not all customers are created equal. This is especially true when it comes to payment timeliness – businesses that offer pro-rated or ongoing services in advance of payment are taking on risk and can be affected by slow or missed customer payments.
Evaluating the extent of that risk and coordinating that risk can be difficult when invoices, payments, and services are all on different systems. With cloud services and recurring billing, we need to apply a different mindset to provisioning, invoicing and payment collection.
In a previous post, we shared best practices on Subscription Billing. Subscription billing cannot be treated the same way that we handle one-time items or paper-based licenses or even project-based invoices. It’s commonplace to apply protections like Billing in advance to ensure that the payment is received before incurring any costs.
Subscription Billing or Cloud services have these characteristics:
- Generally long term in nature
- Customers tend to purchase with options like Monthly or Annual billing
- Purchases are not always large
- Cloud Services tend to be essential services that are commonly used to run the business like Email
Credit Hold Functionality
Regardless when there is a new relationship – financial and accounting processes need to be in place in order to streamline and Sales and Billing operations. Credit management is one such item. Dynamics 365 Sales provides out of the box fields like Credit Limit and Credit Hold. These fields are exactly what they are meant to be which is to flag a customer for Credit Hold and specify a Credit limit for the customer.
Work 365 leverages these features to limit the exposure and synchronize the process between sales->service and finance. A new or existing customer may be on credit hold as the sales team closes their first sale and even set up subscriptions and billing contracts. While the Account is on credit hold the system doesn’t provision any services thereby allowing the finance team to complete any credit management processes like requesting a payment profile or collecting documentation. Once the Credit management process is completed and the Credit hold is lifted the system automatically provisions any items that are in the awaiting state.
Another use case is when a credit hold is placed for non-payment. The customer’s account can be put on credit hold preventing them from making further changes or adding subscriptions. Sales and service teams can indicate to the customer that the account is on credit hold and not something they are able to workaround. Giving your finance and sales teams further leverage to collect payments while also providing adequate system-based responses. This credit hold feature prevents revenue loss from unpaid balances. This is also another example of how Work 365 leverages the Dynamics 365 Sales application to synchronize the tasks between Sales, Service, and the finance teams.
Work 365 syncs account and system information from sales and accounting and streamline the credit check process to make sure all information is accurate and up-to-date. Holds can be immediately paused or un-paused based on the customer’s payment and credit history with your services. These features, coupled with invoice integration for automated billing, help Cloud Solution Providers to control their cloud business even more than before, saving time and money.
Check out our customer to learn more about the problems our CSP customers faced.
Recurring Billing Platform & Self Service Portal – Work 365 Version 2.7 Fall 2019 Release
Work 365 helps companies grow and scale their recurring revenue with Subscription management and Billing Automation capabilities built on Dynamics 365.
Work 365 Version 2.7 addresses the core needs of business insights and self-service. Recurring Revenue and Subscription-based sales happen as a series of collective events that take place as customers stay engaged with a service provider.
The customer may start with one service and then continue to grow their engagement both through their own organic needs and through the expanded service offerings. This release addresses some of these needs by delivering better customer engagement through the capabilities and with the Analytics and reporting capabilities that surface customer insights.
Work 365 version 2.7 features
- Brand New UI to match the UCI interface
- Enhancements to the Self-Service portal solution
- Non-Recurring Billing Contract Changes
- Enhanced Agreement Templates and Billing Contracts
- Customer Agreements to support the Microsoft CSP requirements
- New Integrations: TechData; Quickbooks Desktop
New Version 2.7 Enables Partners to add non-recurring items to their recurring billing contracts.
Non-Recurring Billing Contracts are no longer required to invoice Non-Recurring Items. Non-Recurring items can now be added to Regular Billing Contracts. NRIs that are added to regular Recurring billing contracts are billed as part of the regular invoicing cycle of the Billing Contract that it is added to.
The main difference between recurring billing contracts and non-recurring billing contracts is, if you include an NRI in a regular billing contract, the NRI will be included in the next invoice that is generated; NRIs within non-recurring billing contracts, however, are invoiced the next day. Non-recurring billing contracts can still be used for NRIs; however, this change provides more flexibility for partners to decide how they would like to manage the billing for NRIs. For resources on these items refer to:
Some of the screenshots of recurring and non-recurring billing contracts and items.
Check out these resources to learn more about Work 365!
Recurring Payments: How to Qualify for Recurring Billing Interchange
By of
In our final part of our three-part series on what membership organizations should know about recurring payments, we look at how to qualify for Recurring Billing Interchange.
You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.
Technical Requirements: How to Qualify for Recurring Billing Interchange
We should start by clarifying that recurring payments don’t automatically get lower interchange rates. If you just send a credit card transaction each month to your payment processor for the same amount it won’t qualify for the special pricing, because they’ll have no way to know that it was a recurring payment. To them, it would appear to them as a bunch of 1-off transactions.
If you are building your own custom integration to a payment processor, you must find out if there is a recurring billing flag or identifier so that you can pass it with the transaction. You must speak to your payment processor to find out how to do this. In fact, if you do recurring payments and do not yet have a payment processor, you should start by making sure your processor agrees to:
- Give you interchange plus pricing
- Confirm they have the capability to receive a recurring billing flag
- Allow you to pass the recurring billing flag so that your transactions qualify for the lower interchange rates.
Without meaning to make this discussion overly complicated, it should also be pointed out that we are referring to your “payment processor” in this discussion, but more specifically your and payment gateway must both support this. If this is confusing to you, there is a video explaining the components of an e-commerce transaction
If the prospect of building your own integration into a payment processor is too complex, you can use a pre-existing platform, such as , to handle your recurring payments. Dynamics Association Blueprint is one of the few recurring payment platforms that ensures each recurring transaction is properly flagged to get the lower recurring interchange rate. It’s important to talk to them about this because it must be configured both technically (at a systems level) and also on the payment processors side – so a close working relationship with your processing partners is vital.
The good news is that it’s certainly achievable if you are aware of the issues, take the time to ask the questions, and select partners that will support your business through the process to make sure it’s done correctly.
Dealing with expired credit cards, technical hiccups, and other issues
It is much easier to make a sale to an existing customer than it is to convert a cold prospect to a customer. Recurring billing is a frictionless way to generate additional revenue from your existing customer base. It’s unfortunate when problems occur to upset a finely tuned customer list.
In many cases, it’s not your fault or even your customers fault. For example, a customer may have had their card compromised and it will have been re-issued by the bank. If this happens, the replacement card will have a different card number and expiry date. This would cause your recurring payment to fail.
Or, it could be as simple as your customers hard having expired, and a new card sent out with a new expiry date.
Fortunately, the card brands have addressed this issue through the Card Updater service which is supported by both and Integrating it directly to Visa or Mastercard can be challenging, so it is an optional service that some payment processors provide an easier integration. This makes it fairly easy to easily submit a previously processed card, to request new billing credentials. It’s a tremendously valuable service to any organization whose revenue is billed on a recurring basis. The account updater service is not available from all credit card processors, so you should ask your payment processor if this can be supported.
CRM Dynamics Offers a Recurring Billing Management Platform
offers a fully integrated payment gateway that allows Tokenized Credit card transactions from with CRM and within Portal applications. Your solution is PCI Compliant (meaning you do not store sensitive credit card information) while still retaining the expiry date, last 4 digits of the card, and a token to allow re-charging the same card. CRM can then automatically apply reoccurring payments such as monthly subscriptions, bi-weekly charges, on-demand charges or client self-serve with automated checkout.
Why not and learn more about our payment gateway. We work with most existing credit card authorization organizations.
About the Author
is CEO of , and is one of Canada’s leading experts in the field of e-commerce payment processing. Over the past 20 years, David has worked with thousands of merchants across Canada, the USA and throughout Europe. David consults for large and complex e-commerce businesses on issues such as cross border payments, interchange optimization, and particularly on approval for hard-to-approve businesses such as airlines, travel businesses, crypto payments, and also for unique and interesting startups.
Global Company looks to Rockton for Automating their Recurring Billing
Technology and automation go hand and hand. It’s all about increasing productivity by reducing the time it takes to do a particular task. With CMC Group, Inc. they knew they needed a way to automate their , manual was not an option.
, established in 1980 as a small label distributor. Over its 40-year history, CMC Group has expanded to include multiple companies of excellence, with world-class printing capabilities as the foundation. CMC Group has facilities in the USA, Canada, and the UK and sells throughout North America and Europe.
Manual vs. Automation
They had a business goal of adding subscriptions to their product line. After doing some research, they found as an option to help them with their business requirements.
Teamwork Gets the Job Done
The development team at CMC Group, Inc. were able to work with Rockton Software to fully realize the product capabilities and our requirement needs. “ was not only exceptional working with us through problems and testing, but they also made sure we were satisfied with the solution.” CMC Group, Inc.
Life with Rockton’s Recurring Billing
CMC Group, Inc. can manage their customers’ expectations with proper billing and notification cycles within their Dynamics AX and CRM environment. The sales team loves the ease of use, with their buy-in, our subscription services have been an exceptional addition to help service our customers.
Expand and Grow
In the beginning, they started with only two subscription offerings for their customers. Now they offer 7-9 different subscriptions, with more on the horizon. This was all possible, thanks to their developers and the Rockton team. Together they made our ®.
What it means to Work Simpler & Easier®
goals were to meet the needs and manage their customer’s expectations. With this new subscription model, their relationship with their customers is stronger and allows them to communicate with the customer and automate the subscription process. They were able to take their Recurring Billing to a whole new level. They can manage the billing without team members having to do another step, and it is set up to automatically bill at the current rate on their AX trade agreement.
These are just some of the highlights. Please check out the full Case Study .
Recurring Payments: Storing Card Holder’s Data Safely
By of
One of the biggest concerns you hear when setting up modern payment systems is about security. How can we safely store a card holder’s data securely? In part one of this three-part article on recurring payments, we look at storing cardholder data.
Storing Cardholder Data (Avoid when possible!)
When e-commerce payments were still a relatively new concept there was no standard for the protection of cardholder data. This left merchants to, more or less, do what they wanted when it came to handling card data. Of course, breaches occurred causing headaches for cardholders, merchants, issuing banks, and the card brands.
When card data was stolen or compromised it led to lost funds, as well as the cost of creating and re-issuing the stolen cards. In 2004 the card brands worked together to address this with the advent of the PCI standard. The creation of this security standard has provided the benefit of a clear guideline that merchants can follow for the protection of cardholder data, but it’s created a tremendous challenge for merchants to deal with.
The is a complex, technically challenging standard that even large and technically sophisticated organizations can find challenging. For regular businesses, it can be intimidating or perhaps in some cases outright impossible to comply with.
One of the best ways to minimize the headache is to avoid holding the data. In general, you want to avoid storing sensitive data whenever you can avoid it. (Unless you have strong technical expertise within your organization, or perhaps just an unhealthy appetite for unnecessary liability.)
The PCI security standard appreciates and takes into account that some businesses simply do not have the ability, time or expertise, to satisfy the technical requirements of the standard. Fortunately, merchants can rely on service providers to touch, handle and store credit card numbers, which will keep cardholder data away from your organization. There is a simplified version of the PCI self-assessment questionnaire that you can qualify for if you rely on PCI complaint 3rd parties for the collection and storage of all cardholder data. This allows you to complete the simplified version of the PCI self-assessment questionnaire, by basically stating that you rely on 3rd party providers to handle the cardholder data for your business and that they are PCI compliant. Said more plainly, you are outsourcing the headaches.
This is sometimes referred to as If you want to store credit card numbers, but you don’t want the sensitive information to be poking around your server environment, you can give the sensitive bits to your service provider. They will store the card number and give you a “token” in its place. For example, if you gave a credit card number to your provider, they might return a response to you that says “we’ll call this token #50″. Any time you want to bill this card again in the future, you just tell them to bill token #50. This all happens at a technical / API level behind the scenes.
CRM Dynamics employs this tokenization method in our payment pathways solutions. If you’d like to learn more about how we can assist you in keeping your card holder’s data safe, give our .
About the Author
is CEO of , and is one of Canada’s leading experts in the field of e-commerce payment processing. Over the past 20 years, David has worked with thousands of merchants across Canada, the USA and throughout Europe. David consults for large and complex e-commerce businesses on issues such as cross border payments, interchange optimization, and particularly on approval for hard-to-approve businesses such as airlines, travel businesses, crypto payments, and also for unique and interesting start-ups.
Recurring Billing: A Breadth of Fresh Air
As you’re evaluating Rockton’s latest development for Dynamics 365, , you will see that it can manage all of your recurring invoices, automate reminders sent to your customers regarding their upcoming or past due payments, and even handle penalty calculation. While those aforementioned features are the star of the show, did you know there are many other features included with this application to improve your Dynamics 365 experience?
Document Conversion
In the past few years, the Dynamics 365 team released what they call: Word Templates. If you’re unaware, these are Microsoft Word files that you design, customize, and upload to CRM. Once uploaded, users have the ability to generate reports for entities using this report and have it populate with data from the record.
These templates are very powerful and much easier to update and maintain than SSRS reports, however, there is one glaring disadvantage: they produce word files (docx). Now, included with Recurring Billing, users have the ability to convert a .docx file to a .pdf, all with just a simple Workflow step. This gives users the functionality of the word templates with the security and professionalism of a PDF.
Ability to run a Workflow on all Associated Records
This feature may be utilized more for advanced users, but it’s still worth a look! For example, on an Account record, whenever you change the Primary Contact field, you would also like to update all of the Cases associated with the Account’s Contact field to reflect this new value. With out of the box CRM functionality, there isn’t an easy way to do this.
Enter Recurring Billing, where users get a new entity called Workflow Launcher and a workflow step called Launch Child Workflows. With these two components, users can quickly create a workflow that automate this process upon updating the Primary Contact and saving.
Automate Any Workflow
Perhaps you don’t have a billing need requiring the automation that our product was intended for, but you may have other automation needs. Let’s say you want to have an email sent every other week reminding your team to enter in their time entries for payroll.
With a new entity called Workflow Trigger and a simple dialog, included in Recurring Billing, it has never been easier to run any workflow for a pre-determined time period. This feature is able to increase efficiency for business processes both internally and externally.
Written By Mike Watt, Developer at .
Recurring Workflows in Dynamics 365
Workflow triggers
Are you using Dynamics 365 to compliment your workforce automation? Dynamics 365 allows both admins and developers to automate processes such as performing routine business calculations, sending friendly reminders to end users or customers, creating scheduled activities and much more! These processes are often controlled by Workflows. Workflow processes can be triggered by the following events:
You can also create timeout triggers by using wait conditions based on a specified date field:
or a point in time post workflow execution:
Problem with recurring workflows
What if you have a large gap in time before the workflow needs to execute? Additionally, what if this needs to occur on thousands of records? Well, you could certainly design workflows to accomplish this with the help of some additional background admin customizations. However, over the course of time and as new records are created, these long wait conditions can wreak havoc on your systems performance. Even worse, the workflow could fail (if you’ve viewed System Jobs, you know this can happen on occasion) and never fire again! So, how do you avoid this?
Solution to recurring workflows
is a tool that both our dev, implementation and support teams use frequently. We primarily use it to support ongoing custom data integrations as well as for our customers. It can also be used to trigger recurring time-based workflows or replace recurring time-based workflows. The primary benefit is that it offers better, efficient choices for time-based triggers:
Furthermore, you can include additional logic within your map if you require a more specific trigger date/time:
Scribe Online also offers a friendly, practical admin interface so that your team can easily monitor successes and errors. If errors occur, they’re easy to reprocess (where as in Dynamics 365, you are limited to reprocessing 250 at a time ☹).
Beringer Technology Group, a leading Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in and . We also provide expert , , and .