How to Set Up Recurring Billing in Business Central with SubscriptionFlow

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central acts like a financial and operational backbone for businesses. It sees to various business functions like accounting, reporting, compliance and customer data so businesses can truly have all of their important data unified in one ERP system.

Subscription businesses, however, don’t enjoy the same operational efficiency on this platform as traditional businesses. Even though Business Central takes care of most functions, what it doesn’t specialize in is subscription billing. That department requires the integration of an expert solution with Business Central.

Luckily, subscription businesses get this integration with SubscriptionFlow. Now they can simply use SubscriptionFlow for all recurring billing processes and data syncing without disrupting their ERP workflows.

Why Connect Business Central with SubscriptionFlow

There are a number of challenges that subscription businesses on Business Central face. Common struggles include:

• Setting up recurring invoices

Recurring billing isn’t natively supported by Business Central. Meaning, no matter how much automation Business Central provides in other aspects, recurring invoices still need to be generated manually. There is no system in place that triggers the creation of new recurring invoices on set dates.

• Managing subscription lifecycles

Beginning subscription cycles, tracking their duration, and renewing them are all the features Business Central lacks. The ERP platform isn’t designed to manage full subscription cycles, so it can’t be forced to do that either.

• Handling plan changes

Plan changes make recurring billing more complicated. It’s because plan changes need charge adjustments that need to be presented on invoices accurately. Without automation, businesses have to execute plan change requests manually and adjust bills on their own.

• Automating payment retries

There is also no mechanism for recurring payment retries in Business Central. It is a highly subscription-specific feature, and can only work when you have a system that can prompt your payment gateway to re-attempt payment collection from a customer’s account.

• Tracking subscription-specific metrics

Business Central is great for providing overall financial metrics and keeping books clean. But subscription businesses first need a platform that can automatically feed recurring billing data into Business Central so it can get organized there. Without such automatic data syncing, billing data needs to be entered by hand, wasting a lot of precious hours.

All these challenges call for Business Central integration with a smart software like SubscriptionFlow that can take care of recurring billing operations completely.

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Key Features Enabled by the Integration

The Business Central-SubscriptionFlow integration serves those businesses the best that look for complete RevOps automation. They unlock:

End-to-end automation

With advanced automation, no routine task remains that needs manual attention. Businesses can schedule recurring charges according to each plan, define billing type, customize billing frequency, and activate and renew plans automatically at scale.

Intelligent dunning management

Failed payments are inevitable, but recovering revenue doesn’t require manual intervention. Not with this integration. Businesses can simply retry payments automatically, and carry out various dunning processes (like customer notifications and alert emails) to make payment recovery faster.

Invoice generation and synchronization

SubscriptionFlow generates invoices, Business Central keeps their record in your financial database. Whenever a billing date arrives, SubscriptionFlow triggers charge collection and invoice creation for customer. Each created invoice gets synced to Business Central on its own so that finance teams are saved from manual reconciliation efforts.

Advanced subscription analytics

SubscriptionFlow extends Business Central’s financial reporting capabilities. With this integration, businesses can view those metrics in SubscriptionFlow or Business Central dashboards that are specific to their subscription activity. Major metrics are recurring revenue, payment performance and churn rate.

How This Integration Works Step by Step

Integrating Business Central and SubscriptionFlow doesn’t demand any complex configurations. Businesses can follow these simple steps to get their integration up and running:

1. Configure subscription plans

Businesses first need to get started with SubscriptionFlow, which is as simple as it can get. In SubscriptionFlow, they set up subscription plans of their choice, adjusting them according to their products and pricing models. Since the platform supports flexibility, they aren’t forced to offer one-size-fits-all plans only.

2. Set up customers and payment methods

When plans are set up, customer profiles can be set up too and linked to their respective plans. Businesses are allowed to create these profiles manually for customized plans, or automatically. Customers are created automatically in SubscriptionFlow when they check out using your payment page integrated with SubscriptionFlow. Their payment methods, similarly, are saved in their profiles too.

3. Define billing rules

After customer profiles come billing rules. Businesses can be very specific with their billing rules, and can set up any model/s of their preference. They can configure how each plan is billed, the billing frequency, proration rules for plan changes, and more.

4. Enable automation workflows

When everything is set in place, automation is enabled. Each workflow runs on its own based on its set rules. Customers are charged automatically and sent payment notifications, invoices are generated for each billing cycle, failed payments are retried, and plan changes are adjusted. Automation decreases manual burden significantly and maintains consistency across billing activities.

5. Sync with Business Central

After businesses are done setting their billing operations in SubscriptionFlow, they can easily connect Business Central with their billing platform without needing to code or heavy tech expertise. They map accounts and financial information in Business Central, allow real time data syncing, and then benefit from the data flow between SubscriptionFlow and Business Central. This means they will have instant visibility into all their revenue data as it is combined in Business Central.

Finance Teams Breathe Easier with Business Central & SubscriptionFlow

The benefits of this integration are an immense relief for the finance teams as they no longer have to manually go through their routine tasks. They can simply access the following perks:

Automatic invoice generation

SubscriptionFlow automates invoice generation for your team. This means that your team no longer has to manually draft bills as SubscriptionFlow creates invoices in batches and on the correct billing dates. So, invoicing doesn’t need constant manual intervention, and that speeds up billing.

What’s more, this invoicing is dynamic, not static. Dynamic means that it’s capable of modifying itself. So if customers switch their subscription plans, they will automatically be assigned an invoice with updated charges.

Less payment reconciliation work

Teams can easily match invoices with received payments. This is made possible by SubscriptionFlow as it syncs all the created invoices and processed payments to Business Central, where this data is organized into clean books. There is no need for manual data entries from one system to another. Everything is consolidated inside one platform.

Fewer billing disputes

When billing practices follow set standards and run automatically, it naturally minimizes the error margin. Customers always receive accurate invoices and payment reminders. Their charges are presented clearly on the invoices, and no violation of subscription terms takes place. This ensures transparent and unambiguous billing events to prevent back-and-forth between customers and finance teams.

Cleaner audit trails

Clean audit trails are a must for compliance with regulatory standards. Good news is, SubscriptionFlow and Business Central guarantee that your accounting ledger does not miss a single financial event. This is due to the powerful sync between the two platforms, which makes sure that every single transaction, invoice, and payment event initiated is recorded systematically. This way, it becomes easier to track financial events, detect anomalies, and identify revenues.

Integrate your Business Central ERP system with SubscriptionFlow’s billing engine today to enjoy recurring billing and sync billing data to maintain clean financial accounts.