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Managing Business Credit Risk for CSP and Recurring Billing with Work 365

December 13, 2019 CRM News and Info

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 case studies to learn more about the problems our CSP customers faced.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Recurring Billing Platform & Self Service Portal – Work 365 Version 2.7 Fall 2019 Release

November 21, 2019 CRM News and Info

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 self-service portal 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.

xNon recurring items 625x383.png.pagespeed.ic.sBMZp1l9oj Recurring Billing Platform & Self Service Portal – Work 365 Version 2.7 Fall 2019 Release

Check out these resources to learn more about Work 365!

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Recurring Payments: How to Qualify for Recurring Billing Interchange

May 31, 2019 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

By David Goodale of Merchant-Accounts.ca

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 merchant account provider 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 here.

If the prospect of building your own integration into a payment processor is too complex, you can use a pre-existing platform, such as Dynamics Association Blueprint, 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 Visa and Mastercard. 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

CRM Dynamics 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 download a trial and learn more about our payment gateway. We work with most existing credit card authorization organizations.

About the Author

David Goodale is CEO of Merchant-Accounts.ca, 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.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Global Company looks to Rockton for Automating their Recurring Billing

May 24, 2019 CRM News and Info

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 recurring billing, manual was not an option.

CMC Group, Inc., 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 Rockton Software 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. “Rockton 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®

CMC Group, Inc. 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 here.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Recurring Payments: Storing Card Holder’s Data Safely

April 2, 2019 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

By David Goodale of Merchant-Accounts.ca

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 Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard 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 3^rd 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 credit card tokenization. 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 experts a shout.

About the Author

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Recurring Billing: A Breadth of Fresh Air

January 26, 2018 CRM News and Info

As you’re evaluating Rockton’s latest development for Dynamics 365, Recurring Billing, 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 Rockton Software, a Dynamics 365 applications provider.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Recurring Workflows in Dynamics 365

November 13, 2017 CRM News and Info

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

Scribe Online 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 CRMFD integrations 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 Microsoft Dynamics 365 and CRM for Distribution. We also provide expert Managed IT Services, Backup and Disaster Recovery, Cloud Based Computing and Unified Communication Systems.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

NetSuite a Recurring Theme Among the Deloitte Fast 500

November 22, 2016 NetSuite

Posted by Kimberly Odom, Director of WW Customer Marketing, NetSuite

3915486%20TF500%20NA Stacked PRI RGB Year NetSuite a Recurring Theme Among the Deloitte Fast 500 Fast-growing companies always seem to have several things in common: interesting products; innovative business models; remarkable services; and great leadership teams. With the 2016 Deloitte Fast 500, this is especially true.

Take the No. 2 ranked company on the list Yieldbot for example. Yieldbot’s machine learning system, IntentRank™, recognizes and scores the active motivation of customers and responds with relevant brand messages to produce premium interactions. Striving to consistently outperform expectations creating a better, more relevant web with their technology, Yieldbot saw growth of 39,783% for the year!

The No. 15 ranked company, Pure Storage, provider of all-flash storage solutions that offer radically simple technology is driving digital transformation within companies across the globe. Over the last 12 months, Pure Storage has grown by 7,146%.

Hortonworks, ranked No. 42, is a leading innovator in the data industry, creating, distributing and supporting enterprise-ready open data platforms and modern data applications. Founded in 2011 by 24 engineers from the original Hadoop team at Yahoo!, Hortonworks has grown 2,452% over the last year.

TubeMogul, listed at No. 199, is the leading independent software platform that enables brands and agencies to plan, buy, measure and optimize their global advertising. TubeMogul has grown over the last year by 429%.

These companies also have another thing in common. A strong cloud-based business management system. Each is leveraging NetSuite’s cloud ERP to manage their mission critical business processes. By implementing NetSuite, these companies gain a platform that enables them the flexibility, scalability and agility to compete with enterprise companies.

A robust enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is not something that has traditionally been in the cards for startups or growing small businesses. The huge cost, IT staff, infrastructure and time needed to implement an on-premise system distracts the company from its mission. Similarly, entry-level accounting systems just don’t provide the features and functionality to support a truly nimble company that is positioned for fast growth.

By choosing NetSuite as their ERP system, Deloitte Fast 500 companies already have a platform for growth. Let’s take a deeper look at the list of winning companies.

In west coast markets Seattle, Los Angeles, and Silicon Valley, 56 of the winning companies are using NetSuite, making up 34.5% of the winners for those markets.
In east coast markets New England, the Tri-State and Washington D.C., 19 of the winning companies are using NetSuite, making up 13.5% of the winners for those markets.
The top two listed companies, Loot Crate Inc. and YieldBot, are NetSuite customers.
In the Top 50 companies listed, there are a total of 13 NetSuite customers.

You can see a full list of all of the 2016 Deloitte Fast 500 winners here. If you are interested in learning more about what NetSuite can bring to innovative fast growing companies, watch this video.

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Posted on Mon, November 21, 2016 by NetSuite filed under

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The NetSuite Blog

‘Empire’ Taps Actress and Singer Sierra McClain For Recurring Role

July 16, 2016 Humor

courtesy of ICM

She will play a singer whom Lucious (Terrence Howard) is eager to sign.
Empire is adding another big voice for season three.

Actress and singer Sierra McClain has been tapped for a recurring role on the hip-hop drama, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

McClain will play Nessa, Shine’s (new series regular Xzibit) loyal protégé who, upon first glance, is merely a timid follower to Lucious’ former partner in crime. A second listen, however, reveals she is a rare talent with a killer voice whom Lucious (Terrence Howard) is determined to sign to Empire’s roster.

McClain joins recently announced season three guest stars rapper French Montana and music mogul Birdman.

‘Black-Ish’ Receives First Emmy Nomination For Outstanding Comedy Series!

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.
Recommended article from FiveFilters.org: Most Labour MPs in the UK Are Revolting.

The Humor Mill

Clone Pro- Clone Records with Workflow! (Recurring Cloning)

May 26, 2016 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

With Clone pro, users can set up what to clone including the cloning of related entities, like products, when cloning invoice. Now you can clone with Workflow!

Consider the need to create recurring invoices or recurring orders once every moth. With Dynamics Clone, you can automate this process using workflow.

Here is an example to of how to clone an order once a month.

Step 1: Set up cloning functionality to Order entity.

Go to Settings> Clone Pro. Create new record and select Entity Name as Order

To clone the Order and the order products (Sales Order details) select this relationship for Copy the selected 1:N relationship records.

By default we clone all fields of the Order record, but you can select fields you do not wish to clone.

Clone Pro 1 625x398 Clone Pro Clone Records with Workflow! (Recurring Cloning)

Create new order, add products and test that with one click of the Clone button, the order and products are cloned.

Step 2: Clone with Workflow

Your workflow can be automated to create recurring orders once every month. To do so, add a date field in the Order record. This date field is used by the Wait Condition to wait with the workflow execution and it is updated to current date each time the process runs. You also need to select the Available to Run >As a child workflow, to allow recurring orders to be created periodically.

The workflow will have the following steps:

Wait Condition: Wait until>Date>Equals>Date+1 month

Dynamics Clone Pro> Clone record (no properties required)

Update >Order> Select the Date field and update with process date

Start Child Workflow>Order>select loop again to same workflow.

Download Free trial Version: http://dynamicsobjects.com/Products/Dynamics-Clone

by Dynamics Objects

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CRM Software Blog

Tag Archives: Recurring

Managing Business Credit Risk for CSP and Recurring Billing with Work 365

Payments at Risk

Credit Hold Functionality

Recurring Billing Platform & Self Service Portal – Work 365 Version 2.7 Fall 2019 Release

Work 365 version 2.7 features

Recurring Payments: How to Qualify for Recurring Billing Interchange

Global Company looks to Rockton for Automating their Recurring Billing

Recurring Payments: Storing Card Holder’s Data Safely

Recurring Billing: A Breadth of Fresh Air

Document Conversion

Ability to run a Workflow on all Associated Records

Automate Any Workflow

Recurring Workflows in Dynamics 365

Workflow triggers

Problem with recurring workflows

Solution to recurring workflows

NetSuite a Recurring Theme Among the Deloitte Fast 500

‘Empire’ Taps Actress and Singer Sierra McClain For Recurring Role

‘Black-Ish’ Receives First Emmy Nomination For Outstanding Comedy Series!

Clone Pro- Clone Records with Workflow! (Recurring Cloning)

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Payments at Risk

Credit Hold Functionality

Work 365 version 2.7 features

Document Conversion

Ability to run a Workflow on all Associated Records

Automate Any Workflow

Workflow triggers

Problem with recurring workflows

Solution to recurring workflows

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