Switching From An In-House Billing System To Unlock Efficiency At Scale: The Mediality Story

Republished By Plato

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The Mediality Group is an experienced and diverse media services firm. Formed from the Australian Associated Press (AAP), the country's only independent newswire service operating since 1935, the Mediality group is trusted by local and international publishers and corporations.

The company has four commercial divisions: Medianet, which has been the bridge for brands wanting to tell their story and journalists with their advanced suite of PR tools; Mediaverse, a leading media intelligence agency that serves federal government departments, not-for-profits and some of Australia's largest publicly listed companies; Mediality Racing, their racing and sports data wing, delivers accurate data across all sections of the racing industry; And Pagemasters, which offers exceptional media services for any sized business.

The Problem

Initially, Mediality built an in-house system to manage its clients' recurring billing and subscriptions. They established a distinctive integration with their in-house system and their ERP (Microsoft Dynamics GP). It was functional, but the company couldn't automate many invoicing and accounting activities, forcing manual adjustments and verification. Besides automating its recurring billing cycle, the company was interested in exploring different pricing models to provide customers with a greater value for their subscriptions. But these experiments were effort-intensive, and even the slightest of inadvertent errors carried the risk of hampering their customer experience.

Much of the team's effort was already dedicated to maintaining the in-house billing engine. But the system required additional engineering bandwidth to become scale-ready and support their business growth through these experiments.

The Mediality team, led by software implementation manager Damian Mansour, weighed the pros and cons of continuing to build the subscription system in-house versus purchasing a bespoke subscription management tool. After a thorough cost-benefit analysis, they decided to invest in modernizing their subscription stack by switching to a subscription management platform and becoming future-proof.

The Solution

Damian and the team built a comprehensive evaluation matrix with 45-50 factors and assigned scores to different vendors against each factor. They narrowed the search down to Chargebee, Recurly, and Stripe Billing and ultimately chose Chargebee as their trusted partner.

"After a detailed review, we found Chargebee was the ideal choice as our next-generation subscription and billing software platform. Its core functionalities are geared towards flexible subscription models and rapid market deployment, and it has enabled us to use different pricing models across products and services within different business divisions. It is completely maintained, has extremely high availability, and provides outstanding support services. The Chargebee software is constantly being updated with new features that make our operations more efficient and beneficial for our clients," Damian said.

Here's how Mediality streamlined its end-to-end subscription billing operations with Chargebee:

Automated subscription management: All major commercial divisions in Mediality use Chargebee in different capacities to automate end-to-end subscription operations: from signup and onboarding to billing, renewals, and subscriber communication.
Seamless Integrations: Mediality leverages Chargebee's extensive integrations with its accounting tool Xero, CRM Hubspot, and payment gateway Stripe to ensure a seamless, contextual subscription data flow for its front and back office teams.
Pricing Experimentation: As a customer-centric team that constantly experiments, innovates, and iterates pricing, Mediality uses Chargebee to deploy new or updated plans rapidly. They love the ease of use and flexibility of introducing a new price model overnight, offering variable payment periods, and seamlessly providing price grandfathering to existing customers.

The Impact

Low development costs: Switching to Chargebee helped Mediality drastically reduce development and overhead costs. “Besides not having to deploy our engineering resources into building and maintaining our subscription engine, Chargebee's constant product innovation and expanding pool of integrations provide us incremental ROI over time,” Damian said.
A centralized hub for managing subscriptions: Chargebee is their central hub where they maintain products & pricing plans, subscription creation and updates, contract renewals, and cancellations. These changes are communicated in real-time with HubSpot, Xero, and Stripe, keeping their systems in sync all the time and minimizing the possibility of data inaccuracies.
Enhanced operational efficiency: Chargebee's robust functionalities added the much-needed automation layer to Mediality's revenue and finance operations. Whether automating recurring billing, updating records in bulk, introducing new pricing plans, or generating reports and dashboards, Damian's team found the shift to Chargebee saved them significant time and increased overall efficiency.