BillaBear – v1.1 – Subscription Management and Billing

Version 1.1 of BillaBear includes important features such as:

• Tax Calculation Improvements
• Invoice Improvements
• Quotes
• Internal Webhooks

Tax Calculation Improvements

Version 1.0 included a very basic tax calculation. This has been overhauled to allow for multiple levels of custom tax rules.

Custom Tax Rates

It is now possible to define custom tax rates on various levels.

• Product
• Customer
• Brand

This can allow you to properly tax a specific customer who is in a different country at their correct rate while leaving others unaffected or if you have a specific tax requirement for a product you're able to tax on that correctly. And if your brand is in a country that has an unsupported tax rate you can tax that.

Different Tax Types

It is now possible to assign different tax types to products. This allows you to follow tax requirements for each.

• Digital Goods
• Digital Services
• Physical Goods

For example, if you're in Europe and the item that is being taxed is a physical product or service then the tax can and should be reversed charged. However, if it's a digital item then it should be taxed based on the customer's home country. And in some countries, they have special tax rates for digital services.

Customer Type

One of the important ways to know how to handle the tax for a customer is to know if it's a business customer or not. Now it's possible to define if it's a business or personal account.

Improved Invoice Information

The invoice line data now contains tax data such as which tax rate was used, which country it's for, which kind of tax product the line items are and if it's a reverse charge tax item.

Tax Flow

Webhooks

An important feature of a billing system is the ability to communicate with the rest of your system about specific events. This allows you to have extra custom logic while decoupling your system from BillaBear.

Management

The Webhook Management system allows you to see the status of a webhook transmission as well as manage the active webhooks.

The webhook logs allow you to easily debug issues by logging the JSON body sent and the response received. This will help with debugging efforts when working on integrations.

Events

• Customer enabled
• Customer disabled
• Payment Received
• Subscription Started

Documentation for the payloads can be found at https://docs.billabear.com/technical/webhooks/

PHP SDK

To help with integration to BillaBear we've released the first version of the PHP SDK. This can be found in it's own github repository

Invoice Improvements

Create Invoice - Subscriptions and One-off Items

To improve the ability to invoice it's now possible to create an invoice manually instead of just by creating subscriptions.

When creating invoices you're able to start new subscriptions as well as add on one-off items.

Pay link

It's now possible to provide a link for the customer to pay the invoice directly. This will help to reduce billing churn as customers no long have to pay for a billing run and can just pay using a card instantly.

Invoice Number Generation Options

It's now possible to choose between random and subsequential invoice number generation.

Quotes

You can now create quotes to send to customers so they can accept an offer/quote.

You're able to create quotes for multiple subscriptions and multiple one off items.

The subscriptions don't start until the quote has been accepted.

Pay link

You can provide customers with a payment link that when they go to it they can accept and pay by card and the subscriptions and one-off payments will be started and charged.

Minor Changes

• Increase the number of currencies supported
• Mark invoices as paid manually
• Ability to assign customerless payments to a customer manually
• Ability to assign a code name to a subscription plan
• Ability to create a subscription by defining the currency and payment schedule to decouple for price ids.
• Ability to get the user's invite link to manually give them the link.
• Ability to see the list of invited users
• Added the API endpoint to see customer subscriptions
• Added the API endpoint to see the customer payment details

Future Roadmap

• Credit Subscriptions - Including prorata refunds, buy more credits, etc.
• More webhook events.
• Integration with accounting software
• Time-limited quotes.

Lifetime Deal

To celebrate the release of v1.1.0 we're offering another lifetime deal. Last we offered one for 3-days to celebrate the release of v1.0 for 250 GBP.

This time we're offering a lifetime deal for 500 GBP until the 9th of September. You can buy this directly via a Stripe payment link https://buy.stripe.com/dR617d1yfe01ali28d or you can book a demo via https://app.sessions.us/book/950e63e2-billabear---demo.