Table of Contents
SYNC WITH CONNEX’S CHALLENGE
Sync with Connex is a successful, multi-million dollar SaaS company. To support growth goals, they needed to track data from Stripe, recover failed credit card payments, and optimize their cancellation flow.
SOLUTION
They started a free trial of Baremetrics. Right away, the Baremetrics toolkit gave actionable insights about their Stripe data, automated their dunning campaign, and provided a process for collecting actionable feedback.
RESULTS
Within just one month of using Baremetrics, Sync with Connex has recovered $11,000 in failed payments and reduced billing-related support tickets by 20%.
Sync with Connex is a 3rd party integration tool that automates data entry between QuickBooks and e-commerce channels, payment processors, and shipping solutions.
Since launching in 2010, Sync with Connex has helped over 5,000 businesses simplify their workflows, prevent input errors, and repurpose precious time for more important tasks.
Sync with Connex uses Baremetrics to keep track of important business metrics, recover thousands of dollars in failed payments, and gain valuable insight into why customers cancel.
Sync with Connex offers two products: Connex Desktop (for people using the desktop version of QuickBooks), and Connex Online (for people using the cloud-based version of QuickBooks). Both versions allow business owners to integrate with over 25 e-commerce solutions such as Amazon, ShipStation, eBay, and more, and put data entry on auto-pilot.
With over 14 years of experience in the e-commerce and SaaS industries, Sync with Connex is an indispensable tool for growing e-commerce companies.
Baremetrics spoke with Sync with Connex Founder and CEO Joseph Anderson to learn more about how they use Baremetrics to analyze Stripe data, recover thousands of dollars in failed payments, and learn why customers cancel to reduce churn.
Background: A Need for Automated Data Entry
Simply put, manual data entry stinks. It’s tedious, prone to human error, and takes tons of hours to do accurately. In fact, a 2020 international study found that it’s one of the most redundant and hated workplace tasks.
Despite this, many companies still rely on manual data entry to ensure information is shared between the right channels, including Joseph’s former employer. The company even hired an intern to type 100 orders a day into QuickBooks, despite employing over a hundred software developers.
For Joseph, the situation was inspiring.
“I thought, couldn’t one of them write software to automatically sync orders into QuickBooks?”
Joseph Anderson soon left the company to start what would later become Sync with Connex in January 2010. His mission was to make QuickBooks simpler to integrate with other software, and completely automate data entry for online e-commerce businesses.
After all, growing companies can’t reach their full potential if they’re wasting time and money plugging numbers into several different spreadsheets.
“Business owners should focus on what they do best, which is selling their products and services,” Joseph said.
For SaaS products, building, improving, and maintaining software is one thing. Running a company is another.
After years of steady growth, Sync with Connex would run into challenges that would ultimately change the way they operated as a business.
Hitting an Operational Wall: Why Sync with Connex Migrated from PayPal to Stripe
Sync with Connex not only helped their customers do better data entry into QuickBooks, but they had to consider operational issues that included how to best collect revenue from their own customers.
When Sync with Connex launched in January 2012, they started using PalPal to process their customers’ payments. Stripe, Recurly, and Chargebee were all fairly new products, and the PayPal platform allowed Sync with Connex to easily do what they needed to do: process payments from customers.
But aside from processing payments, PayPal offered little additional value for Sync with Connex.
They could create lists of customers and orders, but couldn’t access important customer details like what products they were using, how long they’ve been a customer, what plan they were on, and the terms of their plan.
““Looking back, it was like running a company with a blindfold on,” Joseph said.
The problem was, PayPal lacked the reporting tools he needed, and PayPal wasn’t planning on building new features. Joseph then tried building his own reporting tool on top of PayPal.
Founders with technical skills have a huge advantage. They can create the software they need at the fraction of what it would cost to hire talent.
That doesn’t mean it’s free, though. If time is money, when does it make sense to build a tool internally? At what point is it more economical to pay for a service?
In his case, spending over 80 hours on the project was the deal breaker. It just wasn’t worth spending so much time building a tool that wasn’t going to generate any revenue.
He then decided to migrate from PayPal to Stripe.
In order to migrate customer data from PayPal to Stripe, Sync with Connex first partnered with Stripe’s migration team to transfer customer name, email, and credit card information. Then, he wrote custom code to migrate additional information.
You can see the full guide on how he migrated customer data from stripe to data here!
With Stripe, Sync with Connex gains developer-friendly features, including easy integrations with Baremetrics for smarter business analytics.
Using Stripe and Baremetrics, Sync with Connex
- Fraud Checks
- Since Sync with Connex implemented Stripe, they have seen no chargebacks or fraudulent payments.
- Reminders to Prevent Billing Issues
- The Recover tool in Baremetrics sends reminders that a user’s credit card is expiring and annual payments are renewing.
- Sync with Connex now receives fewer emails where users ask for refunds.
- Ease of use
- Stripe and Baremetrics offer a friendly and intuitive UI. Joseph’s staff can easily perform day to day billing operations without contacting him. He now has more free time to grow his business.
- Prorated billing
- Stripe automatically calculates prorated upgrades and downgrades. This allows Sync with Connex to more accurately change customers.
- Before, Sync with Connex would charge the full difference in plans. One customer was charged about $900 for three weeks of service.
- Cancellation Module to Bring Customers Back
- Baremetrics’ Cancellation Insights allows Sync with Connex to see who is cancelling and why. Sync with Connex has already won back several users that have cancelled.
- Integrations
- In addition to Baremetrics, Stripe integrates with over 400 other SaaS tools.
Baremetrics as a Solution for SaaS Analytics, Dunning, and Cancellation Data
Seamless Stripe Analytics
Stripe’s platform includes some analytics features, but they are limited to just five categories. On top of that, there’s no ability to customize dates, so users can only look at their data in fixed time periods like four weeks, one year, and two year periods.
Sync with Connex needed to go deeper in order to act on the data. Not only does Baremetrics calculate 26 base metrics (or up to 40 with additional features), users can view their data in customized time frames such as Last 30 Days, Last Month, Last Three Months, Last Six Months, Last Year, All Time, and more.
Joseph says his team check Baremetrics 1-2 times a day to keep a pulse on key metrics like Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), and churn rate all in one place.
Recover to Prevent Failed Payments
Failed payments are inevitable for subscription businesses. Whether the reason is an expired credit card, insufficient funds, or outdated billing info, subscription businesses need an effective dunning system in place to prevent failed payments and recoup revenue.
Before switching to Stripe and integrating with Baremetrics, Sync with Connex’s approach to dunning involved an in-house tool that would automatically turn off an account when its credit card on file failed.
The problem with this was that Sync with Connex customers often missed communications about their card failing. They then had no idea that their account was turned off, and were left wondering why their data had stopped syncing and why orders had not been fulfilled.
The software failed to cancel all users and some users were allowed to sync, if their payments had failed for several months. During the migration from PayPal to Stripe, Joseph recovered about $6,000 in one day of failed credit cards.
Failed credit cards resulted in a high volume of angry phone calls and billing tickets that consumed Joseph’s customer success team.
So when Sync with Connex started their free trial of Baremetrics, trying out Recover, Baremetrics’s dunning solution, was a no brainer.
Recover is the leading dunning solution for SaaS and subscription businesses. It uses a variety of tools such as customizable email campaigns, in-app reminders, paywalls, and credit card capture forms to bring back revenue lost from failed payments.
Best of all, Recover is easy to set up and is completely automated, which means you can focus on other things while it works hard for you.
Sync with Connex started using Recover in May 2021. In just 4 weeks with zero effort, they recovered $11,000 in failed payments. Billing-related support tickets have decreased by 20%, allowing both their customer success and engineering teams to focus on other projects.
If your business is losing precious revenue from preventable credit card issues, definitely try Recover. Get your 2-week free trial here.
Cancellation Insights to Understand why Customers Leave
In addition to failed payments, subscription businesses need to pay close attention to which customers cancel and for what reasons.
After all, these kinds of insights are essential for understanding how your product and services can improve.
Before Sync with Connex migrated to Stripe and integrated with Baremetrics, they were churning 30-50 customers every month. It was difficult to keep track of who was cancelling, as well as how much money they had spent with Sync with Connex.
They also lacked an efficient process for collecting feedback.
For these reasons, Sync with Connex decided to try Cancellation Insights.
Cancellation Insights shows you why customers cancel, and helps bring them back. The feature calculates lost revenue by cancellation reason, and automates smarter emails and forms to collect actionable feedback.
For Sync with Connex, the insights collected by Cancellation Insights were immediately helpful.
Right away, they learned 3 important things:
- The primary reasons why people were leaving were “No longer using Quickbooks”, “Technical issues” and “Missing Features I Need"
- Customers who choose “No longer using QuickBooks” are typically online businesses who decided to shift their focus to brick and mortar sales. In these cases, there’s not much Sync with Connex can do to save the customer. Other reasons include migrating to an ERP solution. With the help of Sync with Connex for QuickBooks, many companies grow to the next level.
- In many cases, the billing contact changes and the email is no longer forwarded. Baremetrics gives us a list of users and how long their credit cards have failed. Joseph’s customer success team calls users whose cards have failed for five days and reminds them to update their credit cards.
- Revenue from reactivations and expansions were exceeding cancellation income.
- This signaled to Joseph that even if their churn rate remained the same, the company would still grow, but not as quickly. He still needed to address churn.
- He could use Baremetrics data to evaluate team performance and priorities.
- Churn data can indicate the quality of the leads you’re bringing in. If you're losing more people than you're gaining, that might mean the wrong kind of customers are signing up, pointing to a potential marketing issue.
- As CEO, he can use data collected from Cancellation Insights to evaluate team priorities and try new marketing and sales strategies to improve lead generation.
The Future of Sync with Connex
To reach the next level of an eight figure company, Sync with Connex is streamlining their sales and support processes. They are making their software simpler to set-up, growing their team, and improving their user interface.
Since launching in 2010, Sync with Connex has made over $8 million in revenue with no outside capital. Their future is focused and bright.
Read More about Sync with Connex
To learn more about Sync with Connex, check out their blog. They have tons of expert information about integrating QuickBooks and taking e-commerce companies to the next level.
Joseph Anderson is the Founder and CEO of Sync with Connex, a SaaS company that automates data entry between Quickbooks and online selling channels. Joseph is the author of “The $20 SaaS Company: From Zero to Seven Figures Without Venture Capital”, which published on June 6, 2021.
Sync with Connex is one of 900+ subscription-based companies using Baremetrics to understand key metrics and accelerate growth. To see how Baremetrics can make a difference for your business, start a free trial today.
