Activating Customer Billing

The gong has gone off. Your customer has signed the contract and they're excited to get started. Congratulations!

But getting them active requires collecting billing information, activating their accounts, and making sure the process moves smoothly. With RevOps Account Activation, we make it easy for you to complete this process. Typically activating an Account entails three step:

Configure the Customer's Account for Billing
Provision the Customer's Account with the correct entitlements
Notify the appropriate teams within your organization of a new closed deal

In this guide, we'll focus on the first step: Activating their Billing Account from the contract.

Let's get started!

Requirements for this Guide

The developer role in your RevOps Console
At least one Deal in your system
A Stripe Account connected to your RevOps account. If you haven't configured that, visit Settings > Integrations > Stripe and complete that process.

Step 1. Collect Billing Information

To get started, RevOps needs to know who to send the Invoices to. This is as simple as a Name and Email address but where they come from are key.

Most of the time, the Billing Contact is already specified in the Deal Summary in RevOps. In that case, we'll use their email address to retrieve their Customer ID from Stripe and link the RevOps Account to the Stripe Account.

Alternatively, when we don't find a match in Stripe, we will automatically create a Customer with the information provided and link the RevOps Account to the new Stripe Account.

Regardless of whether link an existing Account or create a new one, the next step is to bill them.

Step 2. Verify the Billing Plan

Once we know who we'll be making the invoices out to, let's set up the Billing Plan for the Account. The Billing Plan will include four key attributes:

When to bill the customer
What products will be included on the invoice
When payment is due
How your customer can pay the invoice

From here, you can choose Manual Invoicing or have RevOps handle Automatic Invoicing.

While Manual Invoicing is more effort, it is useful when you're building new billing models to evaluate or there are special circumstances on an account. For Manual Invoicing, click the Stripe Customer ID and you'll land on the Customer page in Stripe where you can create a new Invoice. All SKUs you've created in RevOps will be available to simplify the process and RevOps will track it as any other invoice.

With Automatic Invoicing, RevOps will create and send invoices to your customer with a Stripe-hosted payment page for easy processing. For the rest of this Guide, we'll cover Automatic Invoicing to streamline and accelerate your customer onboarding.

Step 3. Automate Invoicing with the Billing Plan

To fully automate Invoicing, we need to determine each of those four key attributes:

When to bill the customer
What products will be included on the invoice
When payment is due
How your customer can pay the invoice

Based on the contract, RevOps will auto-populate and suggest configurations but you can fill in any missing information or make adjustments at Activation time.

1. Select Recurring or One-Time Invoice

RevOps will suggest whether the Billing Plan should be configured for recurring invoice based on:

the length of the contract
the pricing schedule of your product

As long as the full pricing schedule is less than the contract length, RevOps will select recurring invoice.

For example, if the pricing schedule of your product is 'Annual' and your contract length is greater than 12 months, then RevOps will assume a recurring invoice with a 'Annual' billing frequency. However, when your product's pricing schedule is 'Annual' and the contract length is 12 months or less, RevOps will assume that a one-time invoice.

If you would like to invoice your customers according to a different billing frequency or would like to roll the entire contract up into a single bill, you can choose that also.

2. Confirm Payment Options

Next, you'll select the payment methods available to your customer. These options drive your customer's experience with your Stripe hosted payments page.

Note: RevOps currently only offers ACH and Credit Card as the payment options.

When your deal includes the 'Built-In' Billing and Payment Terms of Payment Method and Payment Terms, these fields will be set. Otherwise, you will need to confirm your options.

When your customer receives their invoice, and ACH is chosen as a Payment Option, the bank information to make ACH or Wire transfer will be provided.

You can customize your Stripe-hosted payment page, schedule email reminders, and customize your email domain by navigating to your Stripe Settings.

3. Setup Billing Dates

Finally, RevOps will have you confirm the dates for creating and sending your invoice.

If you've chosen a one-time invoice, you send now or schedule a time for later.

For recurring invoices, RevOps will attempt to derive your Billing Start Date and End Date based off the content of your deal.

Billing Start Date - This is when RevOps will send the customer their first invoice. If specified, it will use the contract start date. Alternatively, if the contract start date is in the past, it will use Today. You may optionally choose another date.
Next Billing Period - RevOps will also display the date of the next scheduled invoice based off the Billing Frequency to give you a sense of when the next invoice will be created.
Last Invoice Date (optional) - The Billing End Date is derived from the Billing Frequency and the Contract Length. If necessary, RevOps will pro-rate the invoice for last Billing Period. You may choose to set the last invoice date to Never if you would like to invoice your customer indefinitely.

Once you've confirmed all three steps, RevOps will provide you with a summary of your Billing Plan. There you can review and activate the Plan. From now on, whenever you or RevOps creates an Invoice for a Customer, it will automatically appear in RevOps for your tracking, review, or triggering downstream events via Webhooks.

Now that your customer can successfully receive and pay invoices, let's move onto the next step: Provisioning Your Customer.