Enhance Your Finances by Using an Embedded Subscription Management System
Introduction
As an organization grows, it devises new plans to maintain its customers’ loyalty, often by providing new features or products that increase the value of their offering. This is especially true for organizations that have a subscription-based business model, where customers pay a monthly or annual subscription fee in exchange for access to a product or service (think software or movie streaming). Though a subscription-based model provides stability and predictability to a company’s revenue, managing subscriptions is an enormous task, regardless of the size of the customer base. It requires precise tracking of billing, payments, customer consumption, and more. With embedded analytics, companies that rely on subscriptions can better track their own finances as well as their customers’ experiences, helping keep revenue flowing and customers happy. In this blog, I am going to discuss:
- What is embedded analytics?
- Benefits of embedded analytics in subscription management.
- Bold BI Subscription Management Dashboard.
- How to embed analytical tools into financial domain apps.
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics is the integration of analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. Embedded analytics helps subscription managers track their company’s revenue performance and gain insights that help them set future objectives for the business.
Benefits of embedded analytics in subscription management
Embedded analytics helps financial departments monitor their company’s growth performance in terms of subscriptions and revenues. Financial managers can track subscription management indicators and compare results with past analysis. This enables them to know which activities are highly exposed to risk, which products or departments have the highest churn rates, and which activities have high costs. With this knowledge, leaders can make plans that will increase revenue and reduce churn rates. The following are some of the benefits companies can gain by embedding a subscription management dashboard:
- Provide risk control measures.
- Enhance cost savings.
- Manage invoices properly.
- Manage cash flow properly.
Provide risk control measures
Embedded analytics helps the company track key performance indicators about their customer subscriptions, giving them insight into the performance of the business and the ability to detect areas exposed to risk. With information like churn rate, managers can investigate why customers leave their business and determine whether they are targeting the right customers, whether competitor services are easier to use, or whether the customer failed to pay their subscription as per the agreement. Knowing the reasons behind customer churn allows managers to devise strategies to address them, making it more likely that customers will renew their subscriptions. By addressing the reasons, the risk of losing subscriptions is minimized. Companies can also use metrics like monthly recurring revenue and average revenue per customer to determine whether their current customer subscriptions will achieve the company’s objectives regarding revenue per customer. They can then make plans to achieve the objective or adjust it.
Enhance cost savings
Embedding a subscription management dashboard helps the company track metrics such as customers, subscriptions, and top five customers by revenue to gain insights into the health of their business. This allows company leaders to compare the amount of revenue specific customers generate for the company and how much the company spent to acquire those customers. This knowledge helps the company pursue actions that will help them acquire customers at a lower cost and increase revenue for the company. Also, managers can use these metrics to determine which services best fit potential customers’ interests by identifying products and services with the highest subscriptions and isolating them from less profitable services. This helps the company put more effort and investment into the best-selling products. The popular products can be used as the focus of future campaigns to generate more subscribers and increase revenue for the company. Work on less popular products can be phased out to save on costs.
Manage invoices properly
Accurate invoice monitoring gives you a record of your company’s services to customers, how much of a service customers consume beyond their subscription level, and the amount customers are to be billed. This gives you insight into the total amount of money your company is expecting from customers and when that money should be expected, which helps your company budget. With embedded analytics, companies can frequently analyze their invoice data to collect information like accounts receivable aging, accounts receivable balance, types of goods or services rendered, due dates, billing status, due split, invoice amount, and overdue amount. Using insights from these metrics, a financial manager can determine the total amount of money specific customers owe the company. From there, the manager can work on better ways of contacting those customers and settling their debts.
Manage cash flow properly
Managing cash flow in your business allows you to see where money is coming in and going out of the company. Proper management of cash flow helps you easily distribute money appropriately within the business as you can easily calculate the expenses involved in completing each task. You can also detect areas where expenses are not worth the revenue generated and scale them back or wipe them out entirely. By embedding a subscription management dashboard in your application, you will be able to track revenues by company, average customer lifetime value, net collections, and deferred revenue metrics to see your cash flow from every vantage point. This helps management know the total amount each customer will generate over their entire tenure with the business to determine whether the business is growing. Also, managers can calculate the amount of income collected from customers to determine whether sales teams are meeting their revenue targets. This lets the business assess future spending and set better goals to ensure that revenues are achieved with reasonable expenses.
Bold BI Subscription Management Dashboard
The embedded Fusebill Subscription Management Dashboard showcases metrics about customer subscriptions and revenues, including subscriptions, invoices, accounts receivable balance, net collections, earned revenue, deferred revenue, top five customers by revenue, customer by account status, monthly recurring revenue by month, revenue by company, amount by payment method, top five monthly recurring revenue by customer, invoice details, subscription cancellation rate, churn rate, average customer lifetime value, average revenue per subscriber, and payment by month.
Key metrics and KPIs:
The following KPIs are visualized in the dashboard:
- Average revenue per subscriber
- Subscriptions
- Average customer lifetime value
- Invoices
- Customers
- Revenue by company
- Churn rate
- Subscription cancellation rate
- Payment by month
- Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
- Accounts receivable aging
- Customers by account status
- Subscription by plan and status
- Payment method breakdown
- Top 5 MRR by customers
- Customers by status
- Invoice details
Average revenue per subscriber
This number card shows the average amount of revenue generated from each active user during the calendar month for recurring services. It is calculated by dividing the total income by the total number of subscribers.
Subscriptions
This number card shows the number of subscriptions purchased and the number of active subscriptions in the specified time frame.
Average customer lifetime value
This card widget shows an estimation of the total revenue a customer will generate for the business throughout their lifespan.
Invoices
This KPI card showcases the numbers of total and overdue invoices.
Customers
This card widget shows the total number of customers and the number of active customers for the business.
Revenue by company
This tree map showcases the total revenue of the customer companies. It shows the value of sales of goods and services to each company within the selected period of time.
Churn rate
This radial gauge shows the percentage of customers who discontinue their subscriptions within a given period. It is calculated by dividing the remaining number of customers in a given period by the total number at the beginning of the period.
Subscription cancellation rate
This radial gauge shows the rate at which the company loses its subscribers because of subscription cancellations.
Payment by month
This stacked area chart breaks down monthly payments by collections and refunds.
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
This area chart showcases the revenue a company expects to receive on a monthly basis from customers. It is calculated by multiplying the average revenue per subscriber by the total number of users for a particular month.
Accounts Receivable Aging
This column chart shows the total overdue amount by the due split.
Customers by account status
This bar chart shows the number of customers in each account status.
Subscriptions by plan and status
This stacked column chart shows the total subscribers by plan and status. It helps managers compare subscription rates between different periods to determine the rise and fall in the rate of acquiring new subscribers.
Payment method breakdown
This pie chart breaks down the methods of payment by customers. The categories are check, credit card, cash, direct deposit, ACH, and PayPal.
Top 5 MRR by Customer
The bar chart shows the top customers who generate the most revenue for the business.
Customers by Status
This doughnut chart shows the percentage of customers in each status, such as active, draft, hold, suspended, and cancelled.
Invoice details
This grid shows invoice details of customers including invoice number, customer name, due date, status, due split, invoice amount, and overdue amount.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Subscription Management Dashboard example.
How to embed analytical tools into financial domain apps
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into financial department web applications. Bold BI helps you embed dashboards in more than 18 web app platforms, including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, Vue with ASP.NET Core, and more. In the remainder of this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards into your Angular applications. Consider a scenario where a financial department has a website like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboards successfully.
Prerequisites
Download and install the Bold BI server in your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment steps here.
Step 1: Creating an Angular application
To successfully embed a dashboard in your application, you need to create an Angular application. To do that, first, you need to create a new Angular project in Visual Studio Code and add the necessary TS files to the project as shown in the following image.
For more guidance, refer to the sample code in the Bold BI documentation.
In this demonstration, the Angular application acts as a client, and an ASP.NET Core application acts as a server. You need to add several properties in the app.component.ts file as shown in the following table and screenshot.
RootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL. For example: http://localhost:5000/bi, http://dashboard. Syncfusion.com/bi.SiteIdentifier : For Bold BI, it should be something like “site/site1.” For the Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string.Environment : Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use “cloud.” If using Bold BI, you should use “enterprise.”User Email : The Bold BI server will use an email address to authorize the authorization server.
Step 2: Create a Bold BI instance.
After the Angular web application is created, you need to create a Bold BI instance to communicate between the server-side (any web application) and the client-side (Angular application), which allows us to embed a Bold BI dashboard in the Angular application.
Step 3: Create an authorization server to authenticate the Bold BI server.
Every application that embeds a Bold BI dashboard or widget must be authorized with the Bold BI server. This authentication step requires sending confidential information to the Bold BI server, such as users’ email addresses, group data, and embed signatures. So, in your server application, implement this authentication flow and provide the URL for connecting to your server in the Bold BI Embedded instance.
Step 4: Run the Angular application to view the embedded dashboard.
In the Angular application, enter the authorization URL and dashboard URL that were defined in the ASP.NET Core application. Finally, you can that see the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.
By following the previous steps, you can embed your dashboard into your Angular application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your Angular applications, refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code used in the previous steps from our documentation.
Conclusion
Bold BI helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will save you time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our help documentation.
I hope now you have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help a financial department tracking subscriptions be more successful. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ data sources.
To get started with Bold BI, sign up for a free 15-day trial and create interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on June 24, 2022.
