Written in front:
The accounting module I am responsible for recently needs to be optimized. I searched a lot of content related to accounting on domestic websites and found that this part is more customized and ready-made system modules. Or better-made systems cannot find prototypes, so record some valuable relevant information
When you are building your Software as a Service (Saas) Minimum Viable Product (MVP), there is a lot of work that needs to be done. It can be difficult to balance this workload.
Oftentimes you are so focused on developing the product that you forget that you still need to sell it to people. This guide is meant to help you get your billing system off the ground to start making revenue, and show what you should be doing when you are ready to scale up.
Subscriptions are key to an effective billing strategy. The ability to charge a credit card on a recurring basis makes payment more efficient for both you and the customer.
To start selling subscriptions to your clients, you need:
If you don't have the development cycles to do this, you will be stuck with a painful process of sending invoices manually, giving customers access manually, and adding friction to the on-boarding process.
Offering free trials is considered by many to be one of the best ways to find early adopters of your SaaS.
When someone is given the opportunity to try your product before committing to a subscription, they are far more likely to become a regular customer.
p>It is good practice
to treat your trial users with the same level of support and respect as you would your paying customers. Not only are they experiencing your product, they are also experiencing the quality of your service.
At the end of the day, you will end up integrating with an external system to handle these use cases. I highly recommend looking at Stripe because they have an excellent API to integrate with and a wide range of functionalities.
If you don' If you want to develop the integration with Stripe yourself, take a look at Servicebot — It comes fully integrated with Stripe and has great Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality so you can better manage your customers and subscriptions from a dashboard.
During your early stages, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham says, “Do things that don't scale. ” Although this may sound counter-intuitive, this is the best way to grow your customer base before you begin to even think about scaling. .
What scaling boils down to is automating the manual processes you've found to be effective at growing your startup.
When you're ready to scale your billing solution, here are a few things to consider:
Automating the processes involved with billing — such as what happens when a user requests a trial, adds a funding source, or requests a cancellation
— is one of the most important parts of scaling your billing solution.
You should first take a look at how you are currently doing your billing. Identify all the manual processes that currently are a part of your system, like restricting access if trials expire or reactivating accounts after they've been canceled. Once you make that list you can start figuring out how much time is spent performing these and start iterating to reduce the most painful parts.
Another big part of automating your process is automating customer outreach based on their status in the billing system.
Customer outreach is key to converting customers from free trials to paid. When starting out, this process is mostly manual. Email people when they sign up, remind them when their trial is ending soon, or ask if they need help getting started.
This is not scalable — you need to eventually automate this process, and the best place to focus on is the billing side because so many steps are processed there
To ensure seamless communication between your system and the customer, it is important for your system to be tightly integrated with your billing.
One of the best ways to automate your businesses with minimum development effort is to integrate with third-parties who have already solved the problems you are facing.
Here are my favorites which I'm using for my own SaaS startup:
Stripe has become the staple of SaaS payment providers. With a developer-friendly API and constant new features, I (and countless others) feel it's an obvious integration point.
Some of the features you can integrate with to automate more of your billing are:
There is much more you can do with Stripe, it should be up to you and your startup's needs to determine how deep of an integration you need.
The staple of Intercom is the live chat widget that you embed on your site to enable communication with your customers. What many people don't realize is that Intercom also provides an automation platform. If you integrate with Intercom, you can send messages to your customer based on what they do with your product.
This allows you to automate the communication with your customer so you don't have to manually email anymore.
Example of intercom outreach automation
Servicebot comes out-of-the-box with a Stripe and Intercom integration. When a customer requests a free trial, Servicebot creates a new trialing subscription and customer in Stripe and a new user in Intercom, and directs them to a newly-created instance to use.
Intercom will send automated messages with the goal of converting to a
paying user while Stripe will manage the subscription automatically.
A good first step to begin scaling is with automating your billing process. When it all comes together, you can connect parts of your business to a centralized location, as well as integrate it with third parties. The result of all this will be massive gains in productivity and efficiency that make the effort well worth it.
If you are interested in automating parts of your SaaS billing solution to do things like automate customer on-boarding and connecting business processes to your billing system, Let's talk
In the bank card acquiring business, use platform docking or "big merchant" mode to access certified institutions and retain merchants Settlement funds and carry out merchant fund liquidation on their own - the so-called "second clearing" behavior. The People's Bank of China defines the second clearing based on "whether merchant fund clearing has been carried out".
In the online payment business, the platform docking or "big merchant" model is adopted - that is, customer funds are first transferred to the online platform account, and then the online platform settles the payment to the platform's secondary merchants. Accounts opened for customers or electronic wallets provided have payment functions such as recharge, consumption, and cash withdrawal.
Whether it is bank card acquiring business or online payment business, the above are called unlicensed payment business.
Second clearing refers to: Offline consumption using bank cards is collected by the POS service provider, and then settled to the merchants using its POS service. Since the POS service provider does not have clearing qualifications, this method is illegal.
Online payment mainly refers to the following: The payment paid by the buyer first goes to the account opened by the third-party transaction matching platform at the payment institution, and then the platform settles it to the merchants on the platform. Because the third-party transaction matching platform does not have clearing qualifications, this is also a violation. If a payment institution without clearing qualifications conducts clearing, it will also be illegal. It should be noted that not all payment institutions have clearing qualifications. Currently, only UnionPay and Wanglian have clearing qualifications among payment institutions.
This article mainly discusses the problem of unlicensed operation of online payment business. The principles of offline acquiring business are the same, but the payment methods are different.
The business model is third-party transaction matching (transaction matching that provides services/goods, etc. to sellers and buyers), and the funds are large account models (advanced platforms open accounts at payment institutions, and then use the platform itself to Settlement to merchants) This is considered operating a payment business without a license and is illegal.
For example: e-commerce platforms Pinduoduo and Mogujie, comprehensive lifestyle platform Meituan-Dianping, travel platform Ctrip, etc.
This is the same whether the transaction is physical goods, virtual goods or services. As long as the transaction items are not self-operated by the platform, there will be problems in operating the payment business without a license.
Wallet functions, that is, the ability to recharge, consume, and withdraw cash, are also unlicensed payment businesses. The method of using virtual currency is also illegal, because virtual currency also has financial value and can be exchanged for other goods/services at equal value, such as the obtained coins.
Strictly speaking, virtual currencies issued with blockchain technology are also non-compliant. First of all, this kind of virtual currency can only be regarded as a virtual commodity. Secondly, its principle is the same as that of virtual currencies issued by the platform. It's the same, familiar with equivalent exchange. No in-depth discussion will be conducted here.
The government issued Document No. 217, which is very firm and powerful. The main reasons are as follows:
For new platforms, the problem of operating payment business without a license must be considered. The problem is, don’t think that the new platform is relatively small and can only be used on the sidelines. It may be more serious after discovery. This kind of behavior is intentional and may cause the platform to be unable to continue operating.
It is recommended that the new e-commerce platform solve the secondary clearance problem at the beginning of its launch to avoid greater losses after the launch.
Based on actual experience, the author summarizes the current solutions on the market and makes a comparison for your reference.
Generally speaking, the solutions currently on the market are divided into 4 categories. They are the banking system solution, the WeChat account splitting solution, the three-party payment system solution, and the four-party system service provider solution. The author will introduce them respectively.
Alipay currently does not have an account splitting plan. It is estimated that the account splitting function will be opened within the Alipay system in 2020 and will not be open to the outside world in a short period of time. The purpose is the same as that of WeChat, which is to increase competition barriers. After all, both Alipay and WeChat have their own accounts. Have or invested in an e-commerce platform.
Through comparison, we can see that large platforms or platforms with higher system requirements can choose the banking system solution. If you are just doing WeChat service accounts or small programs, you can consider the WeChat account splitting function. Those who are more sensitive to costs can choose the four-party service provider system solution, but there are certain compliance risks. The more popular choice is the three-party payment system solution, which has a moderate threshold and no problem with compliance.
The author has studied the specific products corresponding to the above four solutions, namely Ping An Bank's "E-commerce Witness Treasure", WeChat account splitting, Tonglian "Yunshangtong", and Toulonghui "E Account" , Touronghui "E Clearing", Touronghui "Zhifutong" (need to open a bank physical account and there are taxes and fees). For readers' reference.
E-commerce Witness Pay is a payment solution provided by Ping An for e-commerce platforms. However, in fact, its customers are not limited to e-commerce, and can be applied to many types of Internet trading platforms such as B2CB2BO2O. Launched in 2014, it has served more than 100 e-commerce platforms and industry chain customers, can provide a complete set of solutions, and has many successful cases.
Application scenarios:
E-commerce Witness Service Platform 2.0 (non-self-operated platform):
1) Sub-account type
When the platform opens sub-accounts, they are divided into merchant sub-accounts and ordinary sub-accounts. Merchant sub-account funds can only be received but not paid, and transactions between members can only be credited to merchant sub-accounts.
2) Recharge link
3) Refund link
The WeChat account sharing function is mainly to provide funds allocation for special merchants after they successfully complete the order collection. Serve.
Application scenarios include: parking lot payment, takeout ordering, college payment, gas station payment, hotel reservation, etc.
Special merchants refer to enterprises, institutions, individual industrial and commercial households or other organizations that sign a bank card acceptance agreement with an acquirer, accept bank cards as agreed, and entrust the acquirer to complete transaction fund settlement for them. As well as natural persons who carry out online commodity transactions and other business activities in accordance with the relevant regulations of the national industrial and commercial administration authorities. Including physical merchants and online merchants.
Entity special merchants refer to special merchants that provide goods or services through physical business premises, such as shops, restaurants, hotels, etc.
Network special merchants refer to special merchants that provide goods or services based on public network information systems, such as self-operated e-commerce/service providers, etc.
The sub-account can be distributed to WeChat Pay merchant accounts (non-bank accounts) or WeChat Pay user change accounts. One order can be distributed to up to 50 sub-account recipients.
The default freezing period for branch funds is 30 days. From the date of successful payment of the order, you need to initiate the account split within 30 days. If the account split is not initiated within 30 days, the funds to be split will be automatically unfrozen to the account splitter.
The maximum ratio allowed for service providers to split accounts is 30.
Tonglian is an old payment institution with 6 payment licenses.
The Cloud Business Platform is an open platform based on virtual accounts and order payment systems, providing virtual accounts, payment products and fund management services for merchants in various business scenarios.
Tonglian provides virtual accounts and aggregate payment services, and cooperative banks provide fund custody and settlement services. Yunshangtong is relatively flexible. You can choose a cooperative bank according to the location of the partner. You can connect with the bank through a branch or through the Tonglian headquarters. The degree of customization is high. If the cooperative bank does not cooperate with Tonglian, the cycle may be longer and it will take about half a year to go online.
Tonglian helps the platform solve the problem of operating payment business without a license through bank depository. There are 3 storage modes: please docking mode one, strong docking mode two, and weak docking mode.
Some partners are as follows:
Strong docking model 1: Funds are paid into the bank account through Tonglian, and the bank performs fund settlement. After the settlement funds are transferred to the bank's Tonglian reserve account, the The payment from the Tonglian reserve account is made to the merchant's bank account. This model has a problem of transfer payment (payment from the Tonglian reserve account). In the long run, if the policy is tightened, this model will also be considered non-compliant.
Strong docking mode 2: Similar to the strong docking mode, the difference is that the payment is completed directly through the bank. There is no issue of forwarding payment. It is recommended that platforms use this mode for docking.
Weak docking mode: This mode is characterized by the fact that the platform basically does not require development and is suitable for platforms with weak development capabilities.
The platform needs to open a depository account in the bank, and the bank helps the platform with fund settlement. The platform transfers the settlement funds to Tonglian's reserve account in the bank through over-the-counter transfer/online banking transfer. Payment is made from the reserve account to the merchant's bank account.
This model also has the problem of transfer payment, and funds can only be withdrawn through the Tonglian account, which requires a lot of offline manual operations.
Toutonghui has three docking solutions: E-Accounting is a solution that cooperates with Tonglian, E-Clearing is a solution that cooperates with China Merchants Bank, and Zhifutong is a solution that cooperates with Fubon Huayi Bank plan.
Service logic diagram:
The service logic diagrams of the three docking solutions of TouRongHui are the same, see the figure below for details.
The above is the author’s understanding of the solution 4 for your reference. If you have any questions, you are welcome to provide feedback and discussion. Readers can choose the appropriate payment plan for docking based on the requirements and characteristics of their own platform.
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