New Feature: Continuous Recurring Billing

Ignition processes over 100 million dollars in payments for professional service providers all over the world, every single year. This has been one of the most popular and compelling features connected to our proposal technology. After listening to feedback from our customers, we’ve made an integral update to the way that you can bill your clients.

The feedback we received was that businesses wanted the ability to continue to invoice and/or charge their clients' credit card or bank account after a proposal end date passes. Prior to this update, when a contract end date passed all invoicing and payment collection related to that contract stopped.

This was intentionally designed around the best practice of renewing your agreements with your clients. Putting an end date on a contract forces you to review your proposal and look for opportunities to mitigate any scope creep or use the renewal to up-sell new services.

While we are still huge advocates of renewing your proposals with your clients each year, the problem we saw was that some businesses find it difficult to get their clients to sign off on their renewal proposal in time for the next contracted period. Others simply just did not want to burden their client with asking for another signature on a contract that wasn't changing.

As a result, some businesses struggled with cashflow issues while trying to get a new contract in place.

Our goal is to never let your billing or payments drop, just because you haven’t been able to re-engage your client with a new agreement in time.

Our new feature release is called Continuous Recurring Billing. And it will allow you to set rules on what is due to happen to the invoicing and payments for a proposal once the end date expires. The feature is optional and you can decide to turn it on or off per proposal.

Where this functionality really shines is for subscription type services. Any service with the same recurring monthly value is a great candidate for continuous recurring billing.

You will still set an end date but treat it as a minimum contract period, which then gives you the ability to treat the end date as a reminder to review the contract. You may need to review the scope of work, which could decrease or increase the fees your client needs to pay.

Please note this feature is currently in BETA. If you are a current subscriber, please go to Ignition Labs to enable it for your account.

1. When drafting a new proposal, on the General tab, you’ll still find the same options to name your proposal, select a contact and importantly you’ll still need to select a start and end date.
2. The end date now defines the minimum contracted period for the proposal. These dates can be referenced in your terms templates to provide additional context and details for your clients. You’ll also be able to use this end date as a reminder to review the agreement with your client. Your Weekly Summary email will still include continuous recurring billing proposals in the Expiring Proposals list, meaning we will prompt you with a reminder to review your proposal.
3. Once you’ve selected a start and end date, you’ll have an option at the bottom of this page to choose what happens after a proposal expires. Choose to let the recurring billing continue, or stop when the end date passes.

We have even more good news to share. If you have a number of active proposals that you'd like to enable continuous billing, you can do this in just a couple of clicks.

We do recommend that you communicate this change to your clients if your current terms reference a fixed end date.

As always, we welcome your feedback and look forward to continuously ;) improving your experience with Ignition.