Cloud App First Look: Recurly

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Recurly is a SAAS designed to manage subscription billing and integrate it with QuickBooks Online.  If you have a subscription-based application or product and you have been struggling with how to automate the process whereby you get paid, Recurly could be your answer. 

Recurly helps you get your subscription business off and running by allowing you to choose from several different billing options that you can offer to your clients. They also offer a variety of payment methods, payment gateways, and detailed analytics of your results so you know how you are doing. 

Today’s subscription clients are looking for options in the way they pay for their subscription-based application or products.  Businesses transitioning from upfront payments to subscriptions may still find it desirable to pay all or part of a subscription cost upfront, but many subscription businesses can’t handle that.  With Recurly you will have the option of providing a one-time charge or fixed-recurring charge offerings for your clients, in fact you even have the option of a ‘hybrid’. 

Perhaps your business is better suited to a measured pay-as-you go model, well Recurly offers usage-based and seat-based options. As if these five options were not flexible enough, Recurly even allows you to create customized pricing packages that bundle different aspects of each of these options so that you can serve your customer(s) best with the payment methods that fit their needs.

When it comes to making payments customers want options too, that’s why Recurly allows you to offer many of the most popular payment methods so that your customers can always pay you no matter where they are located.  You will be able to accepts credit card payments with an average 2-day turn-around time.  You will average a 1-day turn-around with Recurly’s ACH electronic payments.

Recurly gives you Invoice options that allow you to collect, and your customer to pay, based upon those factors that work best for the both of you.  If your customer is on the other side of the world, like in Asia, then Recurly offers Global Payments via Adyen. 

Why not offer a simple payment processing option that is being used by millions of people, PayPal Payments?  You can also choose to allow your customers to login and make payments with Amazon Pay. Or provide a seamless e-commerce experience via Apple Pay on the Web.  All of these options make it easy for your customers to find the payment method that works best for them.

You won’t be stuck with a single ‘payment gateway’ either. With Recurly you have the option of Adyen, Amazon Pay, Authorize.Net, Bambora, Braintree, Chase Paymentech, CyberSoruce, FirstData, Merchant Solutions, PayPal (both Payflow and Payments), Payeezy, Stripe, TSYS and WorldPay.  And these are just the ones available to you within the United States.

All this flexibility in payment gateways wouldn’t do you much good if you got stuck in one long-term arrangement, that’s why Recurly gives you the ability to integrate with any of these gateways, and then switch at anytime as your business scales or your requirements change. Flexibility means not being restricted to a single gateway either, with Recurly you can use different methods for markets, payment methods, or currency. 

Need some built-in promotional methods? Recurly offers you a variety of tools to help you attract, engage and retain customers.  There are a variety of discounted pricing promotional capabilities along with ‘special offers’ features that you can build into your pricing models.  You will easily configure percentage or fixed dollar discounts, create generic or unique coupons (and coupon codes), apply promotional offerings to a specific billing period, or a fixed number of periods.

Don’t think for one minute that Recurly has forgot about the issue of ‘taxes’ that may apply to your subscription offerings.  With Recurly you have two basic options to handle the tax tracking requirements applicable to your customers and their subscriptions.  First you can self-configure taxes by enabling taxable jurisdictions and setting the parameters for each jurisdiction. Chances are you may have done this in your accounting system, but could you do it for ‘everywhere’? Recurly enables you to not only handle Sales Taxes, but also VAT taxes for applicable countries.

Of course, the 2nd option for your tax requirements is to integrate Recurly with Avalara’s AvaTax service. That way tax compliance and management is a breeze.

Recurly for QuickBooks enables your billing data from Recurly to be integrated with QuickBooks Online in an efficient, reliable, and repeatable manner. Recurly users will find that this integration give them the ability to calculate accounts receivable and bank account balances from inside of QuickBooks. 

The integration provides automatic transfer of information from customer accounts and plans, along with data from invoices, payments, and refunds to QuickBooks Online, improving data accuracy and streamlining your revenue accounting process.

When the the Recurly to QBO integration is first set-up users specify a start date. Recurly records created or updated on or after the start date will be synced with QuickBooks Online. The Recurly-QuickBooks integration will run once per hour. Each time the sync process runs, it attempts to sync all records which have been created or updated since the last time the sync process ran.

The integration is a one-way sync between Recurly to QuickBooks with six points of integration shown below. Once these records are in QuickBooks, records updated within QuickBooks will not have changes synced back to Recurly.

  • Recurly Plans, Setup Fees, and Add-Ons with QuickBooks Items
  • Recurly Accounts with QuickBooks Customers
  • Recurly Invoices with QuickBooks Invoices
  • Recurly Payments with QuickBooks Payments and Refunds
  • Recurly Credits with QuickBooks Credit Memos

Revenue recognition is an accounting principle under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) that determines the specific conditions under which income becomes realized as revenue. For most digital companies that provide a digital service over a period of time, proper revenue recognition is accomplished by calculating the time period over which the service was performed and recognizing a portion of the amount paid for that service each day during the applicable service period.

Recurly's Revenue Recognition feature provides easy calculation of revenue based on Recurly invoice data. When an invoice is created, Recurly calculates the deferred revenue waterfall and creates revenue schedules for each charge or credit and then provides users with a revenue amortization report.

In addition to Revenue Recognition, Recurly provides visibility into key business metrics for subscription businesses using built-in analytics that are designed to help business owners and managers make better business decisions.  There are a variety of reports ranging from an Analytics Dashboard to Subscriber (Customer) Reports, Monthly recurring revenue and revenue growth, Plan performance reports, Churn Analysis, and many more.  Some reports and analytics are only available within specific Recurly Pricing Plans.

Speaking of pricing plans, Recurly offers three different plans. The entry level plan is called the 'Core' plan and you can actually try it for free. This plan is designed for subscription-based businesses needing simply online payments.

They also offer a 'Professional' plan geared toward subscription businesses 'on the grow', and an 'Enterprise' plan for businesses that need the ability to provide volume-pricing with 'all the extras.' You can find out more about the various plans and their cost at Recurly's pricing webpage.

You can find out more about Recurly at their website, or at the Intuit QuickBooks Apps Recurly landing page.