Billing Automation is one of the most important aspects of running any online business that sells subscriptions or payment plans.

These settings make it possible to build an automated follow-up system to collect outstanding payments and accounts receivable. This is also commonly referred to as “dunning”. 

For many businesses following up with customers to collect failed payments is a manual process. Our Billing Automation will help streamline that process and reduce the amount of manual outreach needed.

By default, we have built-in email notifications that are activated to cover basic use cases.

For advanced users, we also have billing-related events to trigger actions in integrations. This allows you to have full control over your follow-up campaign for things like failed payments, expiring cards, and more.

Table of Contents

• Default Billing Notification Emails
• Custom Billing Automation Events

Here’s some info about our default basic notifications built into Spiffy, before we dive into the advanced custom Billing Automation Setup.

Default Billing Notification Emails

We have basic email notifications built into Spiffy for the three most common billing events:

• Failed payments
• Card expiring soon
• Card Expired

These Notifications are active on all accounts by default. View these settings in your app.

We will send a generic follow-up email to your customer when any of your customers trigger one of those billing events. The email will be sent from your support email address, with your company branding. This is why it’s important to make sure you have added your information and logos to your company settings.

Read more about our default email notifications.

If you want more control over the email content or follow-up process, that is where our Custom Billing Automation settings come in.

Custom Billing Automation Events

With Spiffy’s Billing Automation, you can customize customer follow-up based on 16 different billing-related events. These are account-level events that you can configure to trigger actions in other integrations.

Here’s a quick overview video of our Billing Automation settings, and some quick tips on how you can best utilize them in your business.

OVERVIEW

Please watch the overview video below in its entirety to understand how billing automation events work.

Two of these Billing Automation Events, Subscription Unpaid and Payment Plan Unpaid require an extra step to change a default setting within your Stripe account settings (See video at 1:45).

Please don’t hesitate to reach out via email at support@spiffy.co, if you have any questions.

Events, Integrations & Actions

There are a lot of moving parts when setting up Billing Automation settings, so we wanted to be sure to set the stage by articulating the difference between Events, Integrations & Actions.

• Events are different scenarios relating to a specific card or customer account where follow-up communication and/or internal notifications would be needed.
• Integrations are the various tools that you want to use to automate follow-up, and/or trigger a notification.
• Actions are the actual tactics that take place to send a follow-up email, and/or trigger an internal notification. These are also commonly referred to as “Integration Actions”.

You are able to choose which Integrations and Actions are triggered by any of our Billing Automation Events.

The most common Billing Automation Events to use are:

• Payment Failed (All Subscriptions & All Payment Plans)
• Card Expiring
• Card Expired
• Card Updated
• Subscription Canceling (Grace Period Until End of Cycle)
• Subscription Canceled

We also have Payment Failed Billing Automation events for just Subscriptions, and just Payment Plans. You would use these if you wanted to automate different customer experiences and follow-up for when a subscription payment fails, vs when a payment plan payment fails.

• Subscription Payment Failed (All Subscriptions)
• Payment Plan Payment Failed (All Payment Plans)

There are several other account-level billing automation events for Subscriptions and Payment Plans that you can find links to documentation to in the left-hand navigation here in Spiffy University under Automations > Billing Automations.

Selling Subscriptions?

If your business is using subscriptions to grant and remove access to content, or a member’s-only area, You’ll want to familiarize yourself with our Subscription Automation features, so you can revoke access and run specific actions when a customer cancels a specific subscription plan.

Learn more about Subscription Automation

Billing Automation events cover a wide range of use cases, and can be used in many different ways.

If you have questions about how to set up custom billing automation for your business, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at support@spiffy.co.