Needless to say, revenue recovery is one of the most important cogwheels in your invoice-to-cash cycle. But the process isn't without its challenges.

Expired credit cards, payment gateway issues, endless follow-ups to no avail... are not only eating away at your efficiency but are standing in the way of your growth. When DSOs pile up, they have a direct impact on:

• Top-line growth: Revenue can't be recognized until the sweet, sweet cash hits the accounts. More time spent chasing payments means less time left to spend on growth and expansion.
• Bottom-line efficiency: About 1-3% revenue is lost to the cost of collection!

Here's how you can be proactive in the process:

When a customer wants to subscribe to your product, collect their payment method as a part of the checkout flow. Come renewal time, the saved payment methods can be charged instead of following up with the customer for updating their card information.

But what if someone enters dummy card information at checkout? Not under our watch. Automatic Card Updater verifies the card entered for its validity and chargeablity.

Automate recurring payment collections, no matter what the frequency of the subscription is. No more chasing payments renewal cycle! But please note that this works only if there's at least one active card added to the subscription.

Your customers get many invoices per month, they're not expected to remember if their credit card is expiring soon. Remind them to update their soon-to-be expired cards well in advance with configurable event-based email reminders, so you can continue to collect payment seamlessly.

What if the Customer's Card Info has been updated at the Payment Gateway end? Well, that's what our automatic card updater is for. If you are using Stripe or Braintree as your gateway with your Chargebee account, the expired cards will be automatically updated. The new card's details can be updated in Chargebee by configuring a webhook URL provided by Chargebee, in your Stripe/Braintree account. Once this is done, Chargebee will receive the updated card data from the gateway.

You can set up follow up emails with a "Pay Now" link as soon as there's a payment failure.

If the invoice is still unpaid and you'd like to schedule multiple follow ups, you can set up an automated workflow for that as well.

Same follow-ups for the whole set of customers may not always cut it. You need to change gears from customer to customer based on their payment pattern. That's where Chargebee's Smart Dunning comes in.

With Smart dunning, Chargebee customizes the payment retry frequency based on logic derived from the analysis of past transaction data/pattern to achieve a better success rate. Chargebee will retry upto 12 times to collect the payment. Along with this, you could also specific days/dates to retry and collect the payment from your customer.

Chargebee's Smart retry logic retries payments at dynamic intervals based on the type of gateway transaction errors, and it acts on the hard or soft declines accordingly.

Some high value customers may not respond as positively to dunning. If that's the case, using Customer Segmentation to exclude particular customer segments from regular dunning and set up separate, more tailored emails for them.

Dunning is not limited to online methods such as cards, wallets, and direct debit. You can automate dunning for offline payments in Chargebee to send reminders to the customer when a Payment Due invoice is generated for them, and also configure the action to be taken on failure. You can decide the number of days after which the reminders will be sent for offline payments.

Tracking your AR aging report regularly (weekly or monthly) will help you identify concerns before the situation escalates to cash-flow problems. Chargebee gives you a real-time report of your accounts receivable aging brackets.