The final phase of your Advanced Billing implementation is the testing of all integrated systems and flows. In this guide, you’ll validate your planned workflows and confirm the entire customer life cycle is working from end to end as planned.
Summary
- Feature
- All
- You Need
- A finished implementation
- Code
- No
- Difficulty
- ◉◎◎◎◎
Testing your Implementation
You've likely been testing most of these throughout your implementation -- this list will help as a final checklist. For each step below, test all of your use cases exactly how you expect them to function with your real customers.
This test subscription should mirror all aspects of your real use case, and it will be used for each subsequent step.
Important
- Create this subscription with your implemented signup method
- email address (make sure you have access to this email address)
- shipping address
- billing address
- products/components
- discounts
- custom fields
- Include any other elements, for your specific use case, that you need to verify
Important
- Test with your implemented subscription management method
- Test login method
- Product Changes
- Component quantity changes
- Apply Service Credits
- Apply Prepayments
- Manual payment of invoice
- Any other action for your use case
- Billing date changes
- Updating Payment Profiles
- Subscription Holds/Cancellations
- Custom Field changes
- Any other action for your use case
Next, you’ll review and test your invoice presentation, emails, and dunning strategy. Through the testing in steps 1 and 2 above, you have already triggered a variety of emails, and in this step you will create more test emails. Test the following, as applicable:
Invoices
- Invoice presentation
- Invoice emails (both remittance and automatic subscribers)
- Invoice email language
Emails
- New Signup Emails
- Receipt emails after a successful payment
- Cancellation emails - Test by cancelling a subscription
- Expiring Card emails - Test by setting a card expiration date for the same month as the current month when testing
- Payment Update emails
- Any others, as needed
Retries & Dunning
- Dunning emails - Test by deleting a card on an automatic, already existing subscription, or by triggering a 0 net invoice generation on a subscription
This section of testing is the most open-ended. In this step, you’ll validate all incoming and outgoing data that needs to populate CRMs, GL integrations, your app, and external data storage/externally hosted pages.
Native Integrations
- Test all relevant workflows, for any installed integrations
- Subscription creation/activation in CRMs (you tested this in step 1)
- Any other relevant items
External Systems
- Validate all incoming data is accurate
- Validate hosted data related to financial operations and reporting
- Any other relevant items
Your Application
- User access and paywall(s)
- Subscription state changes and app access (eg: canceled and past due subscriptions)
- Invoice viewing
- Any other relevant items
Last but certainly not least, after all of this testing your financial team should review the resulting reports in your GL integration or Advanced Billing’s reporting suite. The following items should be reviewed for accuracy and data needs:
Accounting System
- QuickBooks Online
- Xero
- NetSuite
CRM
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
Reporting
- Revenue Recognition
- MRR
- Financial Reports
- Churn Analytics
- Revenue Retention
- Free/Paid Subscriber Reports
Most companies have 1-3 use cases. Repeat the above 5 steps for each use case, as needed.