Hi All, I have about three months to setup the accounting and subscription management for a SaaS B2C operation that sells subscription access to custom video content in a particular industry. The company is just 4 owners and their talents right now but we want to automate subscription management and credit card/paypal payments. This is achievable with some products we've vetted out like Chargebee and Zuora (Zuora has better revenue recognition reporting but is very expensive to implement and use unless subscription volume is very high. My question is whether or not there is a revenue recognition product or accounting software product that can integrate with the subscription management software in a way to automate revenue recognition. I would prefer NOT to reinvent the wheel of dumping every transaction that exists in the subscription management platform into the accounting software to accomplish this (would prefer just generating journal entries for the appropriate A/R, deferred revenue/sub revenue components). If this does not exist then an accounting program that can take in all the transactions and manage the revenue recognition automation on its own? Does anyone know a good way to get this going? We are expecting 5000-20000 customers to onboard at launch based on pre-selling efforts and if all goes well we may grow to 100,000 customers or more after a year.
Revenue Recognition Automation using an External Subscription Management System
Answers
Anon
There is software that does that, specifically designed for the SaaS vertical.
Please send me a private message here and I'd be happy to discuss in detail.
Regards
Len
Hi anon
As a follow up, could I introduce you to Intacct? Please take a look at http://us.intacct.com/intacct-for-software-companies/?referral=BTP and
http://us.intacct.com/asc606-ifrs15?ref=blog/?referral=BTP
Regards
Len
Hi Anon,
You should check out Recurly. I am a Product Manager at Recurly and I couldn't help but notice that you are in B2C Video SaaS. Recurly manages subscription billing for a few of the top 10 OTT providers. B2C SaaS is our sweet spot. We do have an automated Rev Rec export to handle the calculations for time based Rev Rec, as well as other schedule options. You can learn more about Recurly at https://recurly.com/.
Best,
Danielle
I manage the finance team for a SaaS business and we sell annual contracts. We use Chargify for billing and it's not great for our current structure using annual contracts, but it did work better when our customers were month to month. It's an affordable option, but has limited use cases for billing and simple revenue recognition.
We will likely switch to NetSuite for our accounting system and revenue recognition (included as part of the base package). It ties right in with our CRM and is a one stop solution for billing, payments, revenue recognition and accounting. It is more pricey, but still a cheaper solution than pairing Zuora or Recurly with an accounting system.
There might be cheaper solutions out there depending on how complicated your revenue recognition process is to manage/track.