Community Playbook: How do you run day-to-day subscription operations?
We’re building a living playbook for subscription ops — signups, plan/proration rules, automated billing, failed-payment recovery, renewals, integrations, taxes and revenue reporting. If your team runs a subscription business, please share first-hand playbooks and concrete artifacts.
Please include as many specifics as you can (short bullets or attachments welcome):
- Business context: ARR/MRR, customer count, B2B vs B2C, billing cadence (monthly/annual).
- Stack: billing platform(s) + payment processors, CRM, accounting, tax engine, analytics/reporting tools, webhooks/workflows.
- Key flows & rules: onboarding/checklists, plan matrix (tiers, metering, add-ons), proration rules, promotional/upgrade/downgrade handling.
- Dunning & recovery: cadence, channels (email/SMS/phone), retry rules, success rates, sample copy that works.
- Failed-payment playbooks & escalation: manual interventions, collections partners, involuntary churn handling.
- Renewals & retention ops: renewal windows, auto-renew rules, reminders, win-back attempts.
- Integrations & automations: what you sync to CRM/accounting, common webhook events, reconciliation cadence, sample SQL or Zapier/Make flows.
- Taxes & revenue recognition: how you handle sales tax/VAT/MOSS, tax tools used; basics of revenue recognition (reports, checklists, month-end close items).
- KPIs & dashboards you track: billing success rate, involuntary churn, dunning recovery %, MRR movement, ARPU, LTV:CAC, days to revenue recognition, etc., plus thresholds/alerts that matter.
- Templates & artifacts: plan matrices, dunning cadence tables, webhook mappings, sample reporting queries, and anything you’d be willing to share.
What failed for you? What surprised you when you scaled? If you’ve migrated billing platforms, share lessons and migration checklist items.
Share one short outcome metric from your playbook (e.g., reduced involuntary churn from X% to Y%, recovered $Z/month) and the one change that drove it. Looking for practical, repeatable tactics — please share your real-world playbooks, not vendor marketing.