The team at ChargeBee notes that for the year it had to follow, 2021 had “a relatively low benchmark to beat in terms of popularity.”
ChargeBee, a San Francisco-based financial services firm that’s helping subscription-based businesses stay “agile and adapt their revenue operations workflows to scale faster,” writes that 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.”
The team pointed out that last year “turned around and gave us a half dozen new variants of the virus.”
However, it was a year to be “thankful for,” according to ChargeBee. For them, 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.”
In 2021, ChargeBee had their second run of the Champions of Change Summit with more than 6000 participants from across the globe. They also had their region-specific user conferences for the US; Europe; and Australia, New Zealand, and Asia.
ChargeBee wrote in a blog post that they still hear of finance teams “waking up in a cold sweat to an ASC606 nightmare.” So last year, they took a major step in helping their clients address complex finance challenges by “adding deep revenue recognition capabilities.”
With their first acquisition of RevLock, Chargebee RevRec now “lets you automate complex financial reporting processes at scale.”
ChargeBee further noted that Covid-19 may have have made physical travel “a pipe dream,” but their clients are “scaling their businesses across geographies like never before.”
According to the ChargeBee team, if it works in one market, then “there is no reason you shouldn’t be able to replicate it in the next.” And it’s their job to “help you handle payment preferences, local regulations, language changes, and pricing decisions without breaking a sweat.”
The company also shared that in 2021, they continued their 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, ChargeBee started speaking Ukrainian, the company revealed.
They also expanded their 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 provide “an alternative option to customers when card-based payments alone might not cut it.”
As mentioned in the update, Chargebee now “offers direct integrations with BlueSnap, Worldpay, and Mollie payment gateways.”
And since Chargebee already lets you connect different 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).”
The firm also noted that as their clients go global, data sovereignty and localization “become critical.”
So in 2021, in addition to their infrastructure in North America, they got their data centers in Europe and Australia “running in full swing.”
The company’s management further noted that over the last few years, they’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,” the firm revealed.
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,” the firm noted.
For more details on this update, click here.