Table of Contents
Key takeaways:
- Chargebee is a cloud-based subscription management tool with strong billing features, but its reporting limitations may prevent you from making strategic business decisions
- Accessing your billing history on Chargebee can provide you with key data like subscription history and revenue, which can help you calculate metrics like MRR or ARR
- Integrating Chargebee with a platform like Baremetrics will automatically calculate key metrics based on your Chargebee billing history, providing accurate KPIs and useful insights
Are you feeling lost in the maze of Chargebee invoices? Finding your customers' billing history can be a tedious scavenger hunt. Manually sifting through reports and piecing together individual transactions just doesn't cut it.
In addition, Chargebee’s analytics side can lack the needed depth for SaaS businesses that rely on recurring revenue. But there's a better way!
In this article, we are going to go through how you can find your billing history for Chargebee customers as well as the easier way of letting Baremetrics do it all for you automatically.
Baremetrics monitors subscription revenue for businesses that bring in revenue through subscription-based services. Baremetrics can integrate directly with your payment gateway, such as Chargebee, and pull information about your customers and their behavior into a crystal-clear dashboard.
Sign up for the Baremetrics free trial and start managing your subscription business right.
Why Customers Choose Chargebee
Chargebee is a cloud-based subscription management system designed to streamline recurring billing, invoicing, and customer life cycle management for businesses. Ideal for organizations aiming to grow through subscription models, Chargebee simplifies Revenue Operations for a variety of companies, including SaaS and subscription-based enterprises.
The platform automates billing processes, allowing businesses to easily adjust pricing, offer coupons, and conduct marketing campaigns. Chargebee enhances customer interactions with features like self-service portals, customized pricing options, and the ability to pause subscriptions, providing a strategic alternative to cancellations.
Its systems support a range of operational activities, such as invoice creation, payment collection, and customer relationship management, all through a plug-and-play interface.
Interested in learning about how Chargebee stacks up against direct competitors? Read more here:
How To Find Your Billing History for Chargebee Customers
There is no simple way to find the billing history for your customers on the Chargebee platform. The only way to get this information directly on Chargebee is by heading to the "Customers" section, selecting the desired customer, and opening the "Subscriptions" tab.
You’ll need to click on each specific subscription as well as each invoice, payment, adjustments, and relevant events to sort out a cohesive timeline. Combined with intentional invoicing procedures and best practices, this can be a game changer for small businesses tracking their financial data.
Additionally, you could view reports like "Subscriptions Report" for details on active and canceled subscriptions, "Invoices Report" for a listing of issued invoices with their status and financial activity, and "Transactions Report" for a comprehensive breakdown of all financial transactions within your account. You’d need to manually combine these reports by the customer to view them on a customer basis.
Developers can leverage the API to retrieve a specific customer's invoices, transactions, and subscription history in various formats. This is a tedious process and requires even more coding to get the billing history for specific groups of customers, or for specific periods.
If you want to keep everything in one place and do not plan to segment customers, track the billing history of your customers closely (e.g., to see your expansion MRR or contraction MRR), or focus on involuntary churn, then any of these options might be enough for you.
However, most people running SaaS businesses appreciate how valuable data can be and are interested in getting the most actionable information possible from the raw sales data provided by Chargebee.
Luckily, there is a better way.
The Better Way: Baremetrics
Baremetrics is the better way. The process for finding the billing history for Chargebee customers works as follows.
- Step 1. Open up Baremetrics.
That’s it. Baremetrics connects to Chargebee and magically pulls your billing history to provide the information in an easy-to-understand format. From customer segmentation to customer insights, Baremetrics takes the guesswork out of interpreting your Chargebee customer billing history.
Let’s take a brief look at all of the other information that Chargebee does or does not provide and how Baremetrics fills in those gaps, too.
What Information Can be Found in Chargebee Reports?
Chargebee provides two main reporting areas: Invoice and Payment Reports and Revenue Recognition and Deferred Revenue Reports. These reports ensure accurate financial reporting and accounting for your subscription business.
Invoice and Payment Reports
Chargebee's Invoice and Payment Reports offer comprehensive insights into your billing cycle. You can track all issued invoices, analyze payment methods and success rates, manually identify overdue payments for collections, and even understand customer preferences regarding different payment gateways.
Revenue Recognition and Deferred Revenue Reports
These reports provide accounting for your subscription business. By defining your revenue recognition rules, you can properly track prepayments and upcoming subscription revenue, ensuring both current and future financial statements are accurate. This information simplifies reconciliations with your general ledger system.
Metrics You Can Gain From Chargebee
While Chargebee focuses more on being a subscription management tool, it does provide a limited number of metrics to keep a pulse on your subscription business through a set of metric tools. For a broader understanding, let's explore both their RevenueStory and Legacy reports.
RevenueStory
This tool focuses on insights, guiding you through customer acquisition channels, billing and tax intricacies, churn patterns, and potential revenue leaks.
You'll also delve into customer behavior, order details, premium feature performance, and transaction breakdowns. While it’s a great tool out of the box, you might find yourself overlooking crucial details or struggling to tailor the insights to your specific needs.
RevenueStory is included on the Starter, Performance, and Enterprise plans. Depending on your current tier, accessing its metrics might require an upgrade or additional fees. Legacy reports, thankfully, are available on all plans, though premium features within them might necessitate higher tiers.
Legacy Reports
This classic offering provides detailed analyses of your subscriptions, invoices, and customer accounts. Dive into financial transactions, payment methods, tax calculations, dunning efforts, and even the intricacies of revenue recognition and deferred revenue.
These reports offer granular detail, dissecting individual transactions, subscriptions, and invoices. It's like examining every movement under a microscope, great for spotting anomalies, but lacking the flavor of actionable insights. You might drown in data without a clear picture of what it all means.
The Metrics Baremetrics Provides That Chargebee Does Not
While Chargebee equips you with key subscription metrics, it might leave specific gaps in your knowledge, like understanding customer engagement or benchmarking your performance against the industry. This is where Baremetrics shines by illuminating these missing pieces, letting you paint a complete picture of your subscription business.
Dive Deeper into Customer Engagement
Instead of just knowing churn rates, Baremetrics lets you track customer activity through metrics like email opens, trial usage, and feature adoption.
While you can track Chargebee churn with Baremetrics, we can also identify potentially unhappy customers before they churn and personalize re-engagement strategies based on their individual actions. You can even see how your customers interact with different pricing tiers or features, helping you optimize future offerings.
Untangle Your Customer Base
Chargebee provides basic segmentation based on plan, location, or custom fields, and Baremetrics takes it a step further with its powerful segmentation tool. Baremetrics identifies your most valuable customer segments based on their behavior, revenue potential, and churn risk.
This goes beyond simple demographics, allowing you to tailor marketing campaigns, optimize pricing strategies, and predict future behavior with greater accuracy. By combining Baremetrics' advanced segmentation with Chargebee's existing data, you gain a deeper understanding of your customer base, empowering you to deliver personalized experiences and drive targeted growth.
Benchmark your Competitiveness
Chargebee tells you your own story, but Baremetrics helps you understand your position in the larger landscape.
Gain valuable insights by comparing your MRR, churn rate, and other key metrics against similar companies. This reveals industry best practices, potential weaknesses you might not have noticed, and allows you to stay ahead of the curve in a competitive market.
Foresee your Future with Scenario Planning
Baremetrics goes beyond simple forecasting. Simulate different pricing changes, marketing campaigns, and churn scenarios to predict how your business might react.
This data-driven foresight empowers you to make informed decisions about resource allocation, pricing strategies, and future growth plans.
Actionable Alerts for Timely Intervention
Data is powerful, but actionable insights are transformative. Baremetrics doesn't just show you the numbers, it tells you what they mean.
Receive customized alerts for key events like sudden churn spikes or unusual revenue dips, allowing you to react quickly and prevent potential damage before it happens.
Combine Data Sources for a Unified View
Baremetrics doesn't limit itself to your Chargebee data. It seamlessly integrates with other subscription management tools like Stripe, allowing you to combine all your subscription data in one place.
This unified view eliminates data silos, giving you a complete picture of your business across different platforms and tools.
Getting the Most Out of Chargebee with Baremetrics
While Chargebee provides a toolbox of metrics, locating an individual customer’s billing history can be difficult. Carefully evaluate your needs and budget before picking your ultimate source of truth in how your business is operating.
Baremetrics provides an easy-to-read dashboard that gives you all the key metrics for your business, including MRR, ARR, total customers, and more directly in your Baremetrics dashboard. We can even help you track Chargebee LTV and customer acquisition costs (CAC) through Baremetrics.
Connect Baremetrics to your revenue sources, and start seeing all of your revenue in a crystal-clear dashboard. Leverage customer segmentation features, deeper insights about who your customers are, revenue forecasts and more.
Tired of wasting time on spreadsheets? Get a free trial of Baremetrics today!
