2021: A Year In Review With Chargebee

What did the developer say in 2021 when she realized the delayed job she wrote years ago to run her subscription billing just wouldn’t scale anymore?

Oh, my Cron!

You’d think for the year it had to follow, 2021 had a relatively low benchmark to beat in terms of popularity. After all that despair, shelter-in-place lockdowns, business shutdowns, and headlines ranging from wildfires to toilet paper shortages in 2020, all 2021 had to do to win the “Best Year Ever” coffee mug was just show up, and repeat pretty much any other year in human history.

And then it turned around and gave us a half dozen new variants of the virus!

And yet, it’s been a year to be thankful for. At the least, we are here today writing and reading this, respectively, so cheers to both of us…

For us, 2021 was about enabling you for your future ambitions. To scale with confidence, experiment, expand into new geographies, tighten your revenue workflows, and get complete visibility into every last dollar and subscriber.

Global Series of User Conferences With 6000+ Participants!

For starters, this year we had our second run of the Champions of Change Summit with over 6000 participants from across the globe. We also had our region-specific user conferences for the US; Europe; and Australia, New Zealand, and Asia with phenomenal discussions around growth strategies, ideas, and product roadmap. For every one of you that shared your journey, moderated panels, and logged in for the sessions – a huge thank you once again. And if you’d like some healthy seconds, you can tune into the user conferences on-demand this week here:
North America | Europe | Asia Pacific

Not a Dollar Unrecognized in the GAAP

We still hear of finance teams waking up in a cold sweat to an ASC606 nightmare. So this year, we took a huge step in helping our customers solve complex finance challenges by adding deep revenue recognition capabilities.

With our first acquisition of RevLock, Chargebee RevRec now lets you automate complex financial reporting processes at scale!

Expand Into New Geographies

Covid might have made physical travel a pipe dream, but our customers are scaling their businesses across geographies like never before.

If it works in one market, there is no reason you shouldn’t be able to replicate it in the next. Of course, it’s our job to help you handle payment preferences, local regulations, language changes, and pricing decisions without breaking a sweat.

So this year, we continued our quest to help you conquer new markets with more payment gateway integrations, payment methods, and language support.

In addition to English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese, we started speaking Ukrainian щоб ви могли краще спілкуватися зі своїми клієнтами.
^Like that, but in your email notifications, invoices, and more…

We also expanded our direct debit capabilities to include iDEAL payment systems in the Netherlands. Along with other direct debit systems like ACH, SEPA, Bacs, etc., this lets you offer an alternative option to customers when card-based payments alone might not cut it.

Speaking of payments, Chargebee now offers direct integrations with BlueSnap, Worldpay, and Mollie payment gateways. And since Chargebee already lets you connect multiple payment gateways and set up intelligent rules around which transactions should be processed, you now have an even wider buffet of options to choose from (and negotiate with).

Extended language packs to include Ukrainian
Support for iDEAL Payments for Bank Transfers in the Netherlands
Direct integrations with BlueSnap, Worldpay & Mollie Payment gateways
EU-VAT Management in Intacct & Brexit Support

Your Data in Your Backyard

As our customers go global, data sovereignty and localization become critical. So this year, in addition to our infrastructure in North America, we got our data centers in Europe and Australia running in full swing. After all, as the saying goes, “When in Rome, keep your data inside the EU and make sure you comply with GDPR.”

Lead to Ledger Revenue Management

I remember a business owner on Chargebee once calling their shopping cart page the “most important lines of HTML” on their entire website. For Skip Sean at Trade Ideas, it was the equivalent of an Apollo Mission – they knew if the checkout experience failed to deliver, it’d be like the rocket blowing up mid-launch… So when I say we take your checkout experience seriously, I’m talking “space rocket crash” level serious!

Over the last few years, we’ve steadily strengthened the checkout flow in Chargebee. From form aesthetics to GDPR, single page and popup options, and complete customizability through a nifty little JS.

In addition to configuring mandatory and one-time addon options, you can now provide a seamless experience for one-time payments as well.

For those conversations that require a human touch, your reps can now bring their A-Game to every sales negotiation with the ability to offer discounts down to the line item level (or to the entire invoice) on the fly.

Back at the barn, if you’ve been spending days through each month, quarter, or year-end reconciling payments instead of reading year-end update posts like this, here’s a life-changer for you: One-Click Reconciliations with Chargebee are now Even Better! You can customize your unique reconciliation workflows, set preferences, and generate statements with just a single click.
(Also, if you’re reading this on time, you’ve probably smashed your to-do list for this year already. But perhaps your friend in finance is suffering in silence because you didn’t share this – so go ahead and be a good samaritan).

Oh, and also remember those painful chargeback processes that you had to manually oversee? It’s been taken care of, and you are welcome!

Enabling Your Stack at Every Stage of Your Growth

As the central engine managing your subscription revenue operations, it’s really key for us to ensure Chargebee plays well with not just the systems you use today but the ones you will grow into tomorrow.

In addition to Salesforce, this year we focused on building out integrations with MS Dynamics GP and Zoho CRM, and launched a deep two-way sync with HubSpot that automates your entire Quote to Cash process.

As Joseph Dulo, the Finance Controller of Web Shop Manager says, “One of the reasons we wanted a new billing system was for the syncing of our client account information within HubSpot to provide better transparency and alignment between Sales, Marketing, and Finance teams. Chargebee has helped me greatly in understanding and reporting on the status of my customers without having to jump through hoops that take up critical work time.”

Between your sales CRM, marketing automation, accounting, order fulfillment, and helpdesk ticketing platform, you should now be able to share context around your subscriptions and take intelligent actions.

The Big Story: Product Catalog 2.0

You know how you always seem to have too many clothes lying around in the closet, except when you need to dress up and you always seem short?

Turns out, the product catalog for most businesses was kind of like that too. It starts out neat and organized, but by the time Spring rolls into Summer, it’s a mess of geographies, product families, currencies, and old t-shirts you should have thrown away in college.

And so, this year, we went live with our completely re-thought and re-engineered product catalog in Chargebee: Product Catalog 2.0!

With this, you can now map your offerings into specific product families. Each product family could have multiple plans. And a single plan can hold multiple price points. So if you offer your product in monthly, quarterly, and yearly frequencies and sell them in 5 different currencies, all those prices can be housed into one single plan as ‘price points’.

Oh, and this certainly doesn’t cover all our 2021 updates. You can visit our Spring, Summer, and Fall release blogs, where we’ve explained how all our latest updates can help you grow and sustain at scale.

And that brings us to a neat little wrap to 2021, so here’s us wishing you a pleasant holiday and an amazing 2022 ahead.

2021: A Year in Review With Chargebee