Hello everyone,
This month's updates pack a punch! From highly requested features, to those that can elevate your subscription management in general, here's what's new in March:
More Control Over Proration
Proration is when subscription invoice amounts are adjusted according to usage. Until now, Zoho Subscriptions has handled all proration at the back end automatically. However, we've seen that some businesses, like those that ship physical goods to their customers, may not want to prorate subscriptions based on usage. The following updates address those needs:
Toggle Proration (Early Access)
You can now enable/disable all proration that occurs for subscriptions. This includes prorated invoices based on usage, and automatic invoice and credit note generation for subscription upgrades and downgrades, respectively. Proration can also be toggled at the subscription-level when creating subscriptions.
Note: Proration cannot be toggled for existing subscriptions.
Prorate Flat Discount Coupons
Coupons that you've created with flat discount amounts can now be prorated too. This way, a coupon's discount amount will scale according to the number of days that a subscription was used, and can prevent situations where a coupon completely nullifies a subscription's prorated invoice amount.
To enable this feature, go to Settings > Preferences > Subscriptions > Prorate Flat Discount Coupons.
New Reports
We've added a host of new reports that provide actionable data points for your subscription business.
Average Sale Cycle Length
This report displays the average length of your subscriptions' sales cycles in days, i.e., the average number of days that it takes to receive the first payment after a subscription's trial period was started. This data can be valuable in measuring the steps that you take to get paid sooner.
Upgrade & Downgrade Details
The Upgrade Details and Downgrade Details reports, can display details about when subscriptions were upgraded or downgraded. You can also generate comparisons between particular products or plans, and choose between different chart styles. This can give you insights on how product-level changes affect your business, along with details about how particular plans are performing.
Trial To Live Conversions
This report charts the conversion rate of trial subscriptions at any given time and also gives you a list of all the trial subscriptions that were moved to the Live status during a particular period. Additionally, you can view the conversion rate of different plans to gauge their performance.
Active Trials
View a list of active trials for a particular date range. You can filter this report based on criteria like the trial's status, non-renewing trials, and trials expiring in the next 7 days. If you've enabled trial subscriptions to be extended from the customer portal, you can view the number of times a trial was extended too, along with the source from where it was extended.
Inactive Trials
View a list of inactive trials, i.e., trial subscriptions that were either cancelled or expired, for a particular date range. You can filter this report based on criteria like the trial's start date, end date or cancellation date. All of these reports can be accessed from the Reports module in the left sidebar of Zoho Subscriptions.
Hosted Payment Pages: Multiple Templates & Customization
These highly requested features enable you to go one step further in customizing the hosted payment pages for your customers.
Multiple Templates with Multi-language Support
You can now create multiple templates for the hosted payment pages and pick one as default for your organization. You can also add multiple languages for each template and customize label names and layouts for each language. When you've configured multiple languages your customers will be able to select the language which they prefer when they visit a hosted payment pages.
Font Customization
Choose between multiple fonts and font styles while editing the hosted payment pages to reflect your brand's aesthetic better.
Reorder Fields & Sections
The sections and fields in the hosted payment pages such as the Billing Address, Shipping Address, and Account Information can be reordered while editing hosted payment pages.
Customer Portal: Seamless Onboarding & Collaboration
Our main goal with these features was to save time for both you and your customers by simplifying the process of accessing the portal.
Customer Portal Signup
You can provide your customers and their contacts with the ability to sign up to the Customer Portal by themselves, using signup links that will be displayed to them while making invoice payments, or after completing payments on the hosted payment pages. A signup link will also be displayed on the portal's sign-in page. To prevent unwarranted signups, customers can sign up only with the same email address that exists for their customer record in Zoho Subscriptions.
To enable this feature, go to Settings > Preferences > Portal. Check the Allow customer to sign up to the customer portal option.
Pro Tip: You can use the new Portal URL placeholder in your email templates to place a link to the customer portal's sign-in page.
Share Documents from the Portal
Your customers can share documents with you right from the Customer Portal. Only the Primary Contact will be able to do this, and customers must be allowed to edit their details from the portal.
These are some of the noteworthy features that were rolled out recently, but our What's New Timeline covers a lot more features, so be sure to check it out! We've also completed rolling out features for all users from our previous major update.
We hope you like the new features, and would love to know what you think in the comments below! If you need any assistance, feel free to write to us at support@zohosubscriptions.com, we'd be happy to help.
Best regards,
The Zoho Subscriptions Team