Dunning is a part of a broader credit control system to better manage billing/finances of your cloud service. Periodical correspondence with customers/subscribers about delayed invoices, dwindling service balances or approaching credit limits helps keep customers informed and creates a transparent communication that leads to better customer experiences. The apiculus cloud management platform, enables service providers to adopt a programmed and sequential process to manage all subscriber accounts proactively for billing and payments before they are due as well as those that have outstanding receivables. Service providers have the ability to set up global and account-level suspension, restriction and termination policies based on delayed invoices, low service balances and approaching credit limits.
What’s included in this update and how does it work?
Dunning on apiculus is implemented by creating automation policies that trigger an action based on a trigger condition. Trigger conditions are specifically events such as an approaching due date for an invoice, low account balance, or negative service balance etc. Based on these triggers, automated actions are configured so that subscribers are aware and can take action before it impacts their business.
These policies are either created on a global level so that they are automatically applied to all new subscriber accounts or for individual accounts. The policies applied to individual accounts override the global settings.
With apiculus, the following trigger conditions are available:
- Due date expiry of an invoice
- Number of days without account verification
- Negative service balance or service balance below a fixed value
- Service balance going below a percentage of credit limit
- Transaction balance going below a percentage of credit limit.
Based on these triggers you can select automated action such as notification via email or SMS, restriction from new purchases until previous dues are cleared, suspension of accounts and termination of account with deletion of all resources.
Smart tags for a personalised experience
With apiculus, smart tags are used to insert dynamic data in the email or SMS. These smart tags personalise the emails or messages to include:
Some of the smart tags available are:
- Primary contact name
- Organisation name
- Latest invoice number
- Latest invoice due date
- Latest invoice due amount
This will help effectively automate the email sequence and enable you with least manual intervention possible. A structured approach for reminder strategies ensures that service providers can establish the best frequency of communication before initiating account actions – this can significantly reduce payment overdues and increase cash flows and contribute to the overall customer experience with your services.
Apiculus keeps evolving as a cloud management platform and we shall continue to add more relevant features, triggers, actions and tags to make it more useful to you.
You can register for our 15-days trial of apiculus here. If you have any queries, feedback or suggestions, You can contact us here and our cloud experts will be happy to assist you!
Kshitish is a ‘startup expert’ and has been involved with early stage startups, seeing various phases of growth, for more than 15 years. A specialist in Product Management, User Experience, Technology and Product Growth/Strategy, Kshitish is a seasoned entrepreneur with deep expertise in building enterprise products and horizontal/vertical SaaS. Kshitish did his PG in Product Design from NID, Ahmedabad.