Our Capabilities

The IPA on-demand Billing and Payments product manages the entire lifecycle of any subscription agreement. This includes one time, recurring, or metered agreements using virtually any billing rate plan you can dream up.

The core of the IPA Billing and Payments product is a powerful rating engine that has been powering online subscription businesses for over 10 years. Built around this rating engine, our products allow you to more efficiently monetize your services and interact more effectively with your customers and partners.

Click on the category headers below to view our capabilities.

For a PDF version of our Capabilities Matrix, please click here to visit the IP Applications Documentation Center.

+ Billing and Payments

More than just online payments! Our Billing and Payments module tracks all your customer accounts and which billing plans they subscribe to. It takes all the complexity of plan upgrades, volume changes, metered usage, additional purchases, runs the prorating engine and generates the correct billing line items, invoices and statements. Automated payment processing is then a simple transaction.

+ Invoicing and Billing

Feature Description		Benefit
Multi-period billing	Select from a variety of billing patterns to match your customer billing cycles. All standard patterns are supported, such as monthly, quarterly, annually, one offs and custom patterns.	Separate billing cycles from pricing plans, monthly pricing doesn’t have to mean monthly billing. Provide discounts for up front, yearly billing cycles to accelerate revenue collection or simply bill monthly.
Electronic invoicing	Distribute invoices electronically via PDF directly to customer email addresses or to a central billing administrator for handling.	Reduce staff time spent producing invoices and emailing them to customer billing contacts.
Company wide or departmental billing	For enterprise customers with multiple locations and departments: Consolidate charges into a single bill with line items for each department Alternatively, bill individual locations separately	Invoice customers the way they want, making the payment and budgeting process easier for them.
Detailed line item billing	Itemize various components of the bill, examples include: usage based charges, taxes, leasing, upfront fees, shipping, discounts etc.	Have a service that is more than simply a monthly subscription charge? Make sure your billing solution can handle all types of recurring and non-recurring line items.
Multi-currency	Plans and Products can be set up with the currency specific to your customers.	Invoice your customers in the currency they expect.
Customer email notifications	Notify your customers of important billing events such as: Contract renewals pending Billing exceptions Pending credit card expiry	Reduces non-payments by ensuring billing information is up to date and reduces support requirements by allowing customers to maintain their own data.

+ Payment Processing

Feature Description		Benefit
Automated credit card signup authorization	Automatic credit card verification during signup process.	Ensure billing information is accurate before turning on your service to new clients.
Credit card processing	Allow your customers to pay via credit card. All types of cards are supported based on your merchant account. IP Applications is fully PCI DSS compliant.	Don’t lose clients because you can’t handle their preferred payment method.
Electronic Check Processing (ACH / EFT)	Allow your customers to pay via pre-authorized check processing.	Many small businesses prefer automated debit payments to credit cards.
Invoiced payment support	Manually entering non-electronic payments such as cash and check.	Larger enterprise customers will prefer being invoiced and submitting payments by check. Ensure you can support this and track all incoming manual payments against invoices.
Merchant account support	Support any merchant account either directly or through our network of providers.	Many solutions only support one payment processor. This is unlikely to support overseas customers. In our global market, make sure you can collect payment from customers wherever they are.
Payment gateways	Direct support for Chase Paymentech and Cybersource / Authorize.net.	Handle all type of credit cards, and ACH/EFT.
Billing exception handling	Create configurable actions to be taken upon exceptions during billing. Examples include: Email notification of billing exceptions Flexible options to re-try on subsequent billing cycles Account suspension after a configurable non-payment grace period has been exceeded	Know exactly which customers are up to date with their accounts and which aren’t. Automate your billing exception rules saving you money.
Non-payment grace period	Configure grace periods for non-payment prior to account suspension. Allows for notice to be provided while limiting exposure. Configurable per subscriber or by service plan.	Not all customers should be disabled because of a one time payment exception. You set the rules governing grace periods or credit limits before customers become deactivated.
Credit card expiry notifications	Email notifications prior to credit expiry dates.	Reduce time spent chasing after non-payments.
Service changes	Accurately bill any service changes and additions for both mid-period effective changes and next billing cycle effective changes. The system ensures: All recurring charges are properly pro-rated if necessary All change fees are properly charged All disconnect and one-time fees are properly charged	Increase your revenue by allowing customers to buy more of your service whenever they need it. Many subscription companies bill yearly based on static named user accounts because monthly billing appears too complex. Our billing engine simplifies the generation of monthly bills based on all account changes within that period.

+ Product Catalog and Pricing

Centrally manage your product catalog and pricing, including all current offerings as well as discontinued or grandfathered offerings. Plug the catalog into your web site with our simple Web Service based APIs.

+ Product Catalog

Feature Description		Benefit
Centralized product catalog	Manage all of your products, pricing plans, free trials and promotions in one place. Our highly configurable product catalog capability allows you to define all of your saleable products and services along with their optional components, and assemble them into marketing plans with terms, pricing and discounts.	Don’t have multiple versions of your pricing plans floating around in different billing spreadsheets. Ensure you website, subscriber database and billing solution all use the same catalog.
Reseller / Channel catalog	Provide your partners with the same plans for resale, or build custom plans for them.	Flexibility in your channel strategy. Have a tightly integrated channel program reselling a strict set of plans or let your channel market and price your services.
Bundle partner products	Place partner or OEM products into your catalog and pricing plans.	Provides visibility into partner sales volumes and correct revenue share.
Configurable product options	The product catalog allows you to define any of your products and options and make them available to subscribers: Bundle products and options into any number of plans. Present products or options as optional services to drive additional sales during the registration process. Provide products or options in the customer self service portal to be purchased at a later date.	Don’t allow your marketing plans to be driven by your billing system. Subscription companies need a flexible billing solution that allows them to bundle services in whichever way their customers expect to buy.
Bundled pricing flexibility	Price individual products and options differently based on a-la-carte offerings or bundled offerings.	Provides the flexibility for your customers to buy individual products or buy a bundle that meets their needs. Charge a premium for offering this flexibility.
Free trial support	Fully automate the ability to offer free trials and track conversion to paid services. All types of trial parameters are supported by the product catalog, such as length of free trial period, or number of allowed users.	In many markets, free trials and conversions to paid plans are a crucial go to market strategy. Ensure you know exactly which customers are on free trials and your current conversion rates.
Named or concurrent license support	Sell individual or groups of licenses in either a named-user or concurrent access (pooled) subscription license model.	Many subscription companies would prefer the pooled model for their services but can’t enforce the access control or handle the billing scenarios. The right billing solution will solve both problems.
Using promotion codes	Use promotion codes to elevate the success of your marketing and promotions efforts: Track the success of each promotion by promotion code Automatically apply discounts based on promotion codes, provides free periods or add additional services	Identify where new customers are coming from and which promotions are the most successful.
Product type grouping	Categorize your products and options into types for revenue stream reporting.	This can be critical for public companies trying to ensure revenue reporting is accurate. This also allows you to automatically handle taxation rules based on the products or services in your catalog.
Complex tax rules	Taxes are automatically calculated by the system based on your product types and based on the defined rules, such as: Location of the customer down to US zip code lookup Type of product or service and its taxable status International tax rules	Ensure your taxation rules for your products and geographic locations are always up to date and accurate.

+ Pricing

Feature Description		Benefit
Highly flexible pricing models	Pricing plans can support all the typical subscription based pricing capabilities such as: Initial setup charges or discounts Recurring charges based on selected plans and options Usage charges on top of base monthly subscription charges Cancellation charges Discounts One time charges	As online services evolve, the pricing plans used to sell them are changing. Many services are becoming highly metered while many still charge a simple flat monthly fee. As your market evolves don’t let your billing solution drive our pricing strategy.
Discounting	Apply discounts to plans that bundle services together or to one off customer purchases. Common discounting examples include: Pre-paid discounts Volume discounts Length of term discounts Negotiated pricing Marketing promotions	Negotiated pricing hasn’t disappeared entirely in the subscription world. Ensure your billing system still provides you the flexibility you need to sell efficiently.
Customer specific pricing plans	Support different customers on similar or the same services receiving different pricing.	Pricing plans will change over time. Ensure you can support both grandfathering of plans for current customers or rollover to the new plans automatically.
Legacy pricing support	Maintain current pricing for existing customers while introducing new pricing plans for future customers.	Most subscriptions are sold with a contract term in place. Ensure you can increase your pricing for new customers while adhering to the contract terms for existing customers.
Automat pricing updates	Automatically roll out changes to pricing and/or subscribed service options to all or a part of your subscriber base.
Negotiated pricing	Create standard marketing and pricing plans but maintain the flexibility to price products on a one off basis for special customers.	Provides the flexibility to aggressively target large accounts.
Tiered pricing	Bill individual customers based on usage tiers.	Reward customers for increased usage with tiered pricing.

+ Client Communication

Feature Description		Benefit
Messaging	Send marketing messages to your existing client base.	Notify subscribers of upcoming services and increase free trial conversion rates.
CRM integration	Push new subscribers directly into your CRM system.	Excellent tool for identifying all of your free trial users for follow-ups.
Marketing opt-in, opt-out	Allow subscribers to opt-in or opt-out of marketing notifications to support anti-spam legislation.	Ensure customers are in control of the communication they receive.

+ Customer and Subscriber Management

Provide your customers the self-service control over their plans they want while giving you the individual subscriber tracking and all the workflow interfaces your staff and partners need.

+ Subscription License Management

Feature Description		Benefit
Named user licensing	Sell a specified number of subscriptions based on named users. Our session management ensures users logging into your application have valid billing accounts. Allow administrators (customer or internal) to re-purpose as needed.	Ensure billing accounts are up to date before allowing subscribers to access your service. Decreases payment exceptions and collections efforts.
Concurrent or pooled user licensing	Allows for unlimited numbers of named users to access your application but only to a maximum number of concurrent subscriptions purchased. Once that limit has been reached, additional users will not be allowed to log in to the application without purchasing an additional license.	Enable pooled or concurrent access billing without writing new subscriber management code.

+ Customer Signup and Self Service

Feature Description		Benefit
Automated customer on-boarding	Provide your customers with automated online customer registration. Our interfaces can be directly embedded into existing marketing web sites or customized as required. The automated registration interface allows the customer to: View all available plans and options Select the plan and associated options they want Register for the service and provide all the necessary information to set up an account and provision the service Billing and service provisioning is automated.	Completely automate customer on-boarding and synchronize your billing information with your service data.
End user license agreements (EULA)	Present the user with an EULA during the sign up process and track acceptance.	Ensure new subscribers accept EULA’s prior to account activation.
Customized onboarding rules enforcement	Support activities that must be accomplished prior to final account setup such as: Creating customer accounts in a suspended state awaiting some form of administrative process (i.e. formal contract execution etc.)	Not all sales cycles are the same. Fit your billing solution to your sales and onboarding process.
Support for self service ordering and changes	Allow your customer administrators to make changes to their existing subscriptions themselves.	Reduces customer support costs and increases customer loyalty by allowing them to manage their own accounts and volumes.
User profile self service	Allow individual subscribers to maintain their own profiles and related settings.	Significantly reduces your customer support effort. Configure which portions of an account you will let your customer administer.
Customer administrator support	Enable customer administration accounts that are authorized to manage customer subscriptions, billing information and subscriber information such as: User account details Deactivation or removal of accounts Addition of new user accounts	This self-service capability significantly reduces the amount of effort required by your customer support team.

+ Channel and Partner Management

Bundle partner services into your product catalog and sell them through channels while accurately tracking revenue and customer ownership. Don't get caught not knowing what share of your business comes from which channels.

+ Partner and Reseller Support

Feature Description		Benefit
Multiple reseller support	Acquire and track customers through multiple resellers.	Gain visibility into exactly which customers belong to which reseller channel. Understand the correct revenue share associated with each customer.
Reseller hierarchy support	Allow resellers to manage any additional resellers that roll up to them.	This can be a crucial capability for addressing the SMB market through VAR channels.
Ability to calculate commissions for sales reps or resellers	Using the partner reports, identify commissions based on reseller and direct sales representative customer acquisition.	Provides visibility and creates trust within your resale channel.
Ability to brand or co-brand customer self-service portals	The customer signup and administration interfaces can be modified to support both partner white-labeling and co-branding.	White-label your entire customer experience.
Invoice branding	Brand or co-brand your invoices to bill on behalf of a partner.	White-label your entire customer experience.
Partner administration	Delegate administration of customer accounts to your resellers or partners.	Allow VARs to administer their own customer accounts, reducing the cost of your customer support.

+ Reporting, Administration, Integration and Operational Considerations

Our systems are extremely easy to integrate with your software or services through standard SOAP or XML APIs. Once operational you can rest assured of the quality and availability of our systems and support with our service level agreement and uptime guarantees in place.

+ Reporting

Feature Description		Benefit
Pre-configured and customizable reporting	Use the comprehensive set of preconfigured reports or define new reports to give you the information you want.	Running a subscription business requires a different set of metrics than traditional shipped products. Ensure you can track your monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and Renewal rate trends accurately.
Subscriber account reports	Identify subscribers for each customer and their status (i.e. active, suspended, cancelled).	Know exactly what the status of your subscriber base is.
Customer account reports	Report on customer accounts: Overall By reseller By status (such as those pending expiry) By services and products	Be clear on who is successfully selling your services and which plans are the most effective.
Billing reports	Reports that identify crucial billing information such as: Aged receivables Sales distribution by product codes Billing schedule by customer Accounts with credit cards that have expired or are about to Taxation summary information Billing trends Promotion codes	These are the crucial metrics for any subscription company.
Product plan reports	Report on subscribers organized by plan. Filters and options enable detailed views of the individual user level or summarization by customer and specific location.	What plans are the most popular, which plans need to be adjusted.
Product promotion summaries	Lists all promotions in a given date range and account status	Track marketing efforts to determine which are driving new subscribers and which are just costing you money.

+ Administration

Feature Description		Benefit
Role based administration	Highly configurable role based access. Create custom roles using fine-grained feature level access, or use standard roles. Plan administrators: create and modify all marketing plans. Billing and system administrators: Access customer records and billing information. Customer administrator: Manages subscription licenses, can add and change services according to the permissions you give them. Customer support agent: Read only access to subscription data.	Tailor the solution to how your people work.
Reseller administration	Manage your reseller channels: Add, delete or group resellers Manage the plans they can sell Ensure financials roll up to where you want them Calculate commissions
Audit history	Review any changes that were made to customer accounts and identify who made them and when.	Always know who last worked on a customer account or changed a service plan.
Customer care / interaction history	Your customer care and administrators can enter contact details at the user level.

+ Integration

Feature Description		Benefit
Standards-based integration APIs	The system has an extensive set of APIs that can be used to integrate with existing systems. The APIs are all web services based (SOAP and XML), documented and accessible securely over the Internet.	On demand services are increasingly being integrated with each other to provide comprehensive capabilities. Ensure your billing solution and service works as one.
Signup integration	Existing signup interfaces can be used or you can use interfaces and integrate existing signup portals with the IP Applications’ system using the open APIs.	Quickly integrate your web site with your centralized product catalog. Change plans in one place only.
Provisioning systems	External API calls can be configured to fire upon various events in the system such as order confirmation.	This allows the simple integration of the customer signup procedure into your provisioning activities.
CRM systems	Automatically push customer information to your CRM system (such as SalesForce.com and Sugar CRM).	Keep your CRM solution up to date with the latest customer activities.
Email integration	Extensive event driven email notifications can be used to integrate into legacy systems.	Many legacy solutions use email as an integration option.
Custom integration	Our web services based APIs allow customers to create custom integrations to incorporate the system into existing applications.

+ Operational

Uptime SLA guarantees	Provided as part of the standard contract.
Response time guarantees	Provided as part of the standard contract.
Data back-up policies	Provided as part of the standard contract.
Technical support	Provided during business hours with 24/7 emergency support.