Back in April, we rolled out a new sidebar, but we knew there was more we could do to streamline your experience. Today, we’re excited to announce a complete overhaul of our navigation system, making it easier to access all your features and settings in one unified place. Let’s take a closer look at the key improvements:

1. Revamped 'Configurations' section

The Configurations section is now your one-stop hub for everything product-related. Whether it’s setting up new plans or configuring your DATEV export, you’ll find everything you need here, clearly organized.

2. Unified 'Settings' and 'Configurations'

Previously, having both "Settings" and "Configurations" caused some confusion about where to find account versus product-related options. We’ve simplified things by removing the "Settings" section altogether. Now, all account and organization-related settings can be found under Configurations > Admin and Billing.

3. New search functionality for menu options

With so many features packed into the platform, it can be tricky to remember where everything lives. That’s why we’ve added a Search function! Quickly find the menu option you’re looking for without having to hunt through categories.

4. Pin most-used features

To make navigation even faster, you can now pin your most-used feature groups for quick access. Simply open the search menu to see an alphabetical list of all available features, and pin up to five of your favorites for instant access.

The enhanced sidebar is designed to save you time and make navigation more intuitive. We’re confident this update will improve your overall experience but let us know first hand by commenting below! 🚀

We’re thrilled to unveil the Billing Dashboard, your new command center for tracking and optimizing your subscription business. The dashboard is designed to help you uncover the insights that matter most—insights to drive growth, maintain a healthy cash flow, and make strategic decisions based on real data.

How will the billing dashboard elevate your business?

• Track Revenue Growth and Seasonal Trends
  Use the Total Billing Over Time metric to visualize your revenue trajectory. Identify periods of growth, understand seasonal patterns, and adjust your business strategy to capitalize on emerging trends.
• Keep Cash Flow Healthy
  The Net Billing and Credit Notes metrics ensure you stay on top of your receivables and refunds, giving you a clear picture of your cash flow at all times.
• Forecast Future Growth
  With the New Billing metric, evaluate the success of your customer acquisition efforts. This insight enables you to forecast future revenue and plan for scaling your operations.
• Optimize Collections
  Compare Total Billing vs. Total Billing Paid to assess your collection efficiency. Spot gaps in payment success rates and take proactive steps to improve cash recovery.
• Refine Marketing and Sales Strategies
  Identify your Top-Performing Countries and Plans to pinpoint where your offerings resonate most. Use these insights to guide targeted campaigns and prioritize high-impact revenue drivers.

What’s the value for your business?

The Billing Dashboard isn’t just about numbers—it’s about actionable insights directly impacting your bottom line. Whether optimizing your marketing spend, improving payment collections, or preparing to scale, this dashboard puts the metrics you need at your fingertips.

Get Started Today

The Billing Dashboard is now live and ready to deliver insights into your subscription business. Log in to your account, navigate to 'Analyze' and then the Billing dashboard to explore your data. 

For any questions or additional guidance contact support at any time.

Happy Monday Merchants!

We're excited to enhance Analyze today with the launch of (arguably) one of the most crucial dashboards, 'Customer Health' which provides insights into your churn & retention metrics. 

The new dashboard offers you powerful insights into your customer activity, helping you track performance, reduce churn, and maximize retention—monitoring the impact of your subscription business over time. 

With the new Customer Health Dashboard, you can:

• Track churn metrics including: The total cost of subscribers churned, the overall churn % rate, scheduled cancellations, and individual subscribers have churned. 
  
• Retention metrics including: Customer Retention Rate (CRR) & Net Revenue Retention Understand when customers churn, and take action to retain them.
  

We’ve designed these dashboard metrics along with the Revenue and Payment metrics dashboards to give you full visibility into your customer base and subscription performance, empowering you to make data-driven decisions that drive results. By analyzing the data you can:

• Track customer churn: Understand when and why customers churn, and take action to retain them.
  
• Boost retention: Identify key drivers of customer loyalty and increase their lifetime value.
• Measure ROI: Get a clear picture of how your subscription strategy and our platform are contributing to your business growth.

Navigate to ➡ Analyze ➡ Customer Health to view your data. 

Note. The dashboards will show your historical data, if you think this could be wrong reach out to support anytime for us to investigate. 

Help Shape the Future of Analyze 🚀

We're enhancing our dashboards with new KPIs and metrics all the time, and your insights matter. Book a 30-minute product discovery call with Adrian Wnuk our Analyze Product Manager to hear what we have planned. Share your must-haves and shape what's next. 

Book a session

Hi Billwerk tribe, 

We are thrilled to introduce our latest feature: B2B Reverse Charge! This enhancement is designed to make selling your services across the EU smoother and more compliant with tax regulations. Reverse charging is a tax mechanism where the recipient of the goods or services is liable to pay the tax instead of you, the supplier. This is only applicable for B2B transactions involving cross-border services or goods in the EU. The Reverse Charge mechanism does not apply to B2C transactions.    

What does this mean for you?

Reverse Charge functionality empowers B2B finance teams to navigate complex international tax scenarios effortlessly. By automating the identification, calculation, and reporting of reverse charges, we help you maintain compliance, reduce risk, and free up valuable time for strategic financial planning.

• Tax handling: Our system now applies the tax rates configured in the Tax Policy, ensuring compliance without any extra effort from you. When the Reverse Charge setting is enabled, the system will handle the application of reverse charge where ever applicable.
• Simplified operations: No need to manage complex tax rules or keep track of different tax rates for various countries. We’ve got it covered, freeing up your time to focus on growing your business.
• Accurate invoicing: Rest assured that your invoices will reflect the appropriate tax information, reducing the risk of errors and potential penalties.

How to Enable: To take advantage of this feature, simply create a new Tax Policy or edit an existing under Configurations and turn on the Reverse Charge setting.

When is Reverse Charge Applied?

• Countries: The reverse charge is applied when the customer’s country is different from your account’s country.
• VAT ID: The customer's record in the system should have a valid VAT ID configured
• Tax Policy: The tax policy associated with the Plan, Add-On and Usage-based billing has reverse charge enabled for it

Invoice and credit note update: When the Reverse Charge setting is enabled, your invoices and credit notes will include the text "Reverse Charge" in all the available EU languages in Billwerk+ Optimize as determined by Article 226 paragraph 11a of the VAT Directive 2006/112/EC (amending Directive 2010/45/EU of 13 July 2010)

Why is this Important?  Implementing reverse charges on B2B invoices and subscriptions can significantly impact your tax management processes, offering financial and operational advantages. 

Need Help? If you have any questions or need assistance with setting up the new feature, our support team is here to help. Raise a support ticket in the portal under the ? Help section.

We are excited to announce the introduction of Usage-based billing within the platform. With Usage-based billing, your customers can now enjoy tailored billing that scales with their actual consumption, ensuring they only pay for what they use. This feature allows you to test, measure and scale your pricing strategy with flexibility and reduce churn by offering tailored plans that grow with your customers.

Why We Introduced It:

In response to customer feedback and evolving market demands, we recognized the need for a billing model that adapts to variable usage. Whether it’s SaaS, utilities, or any consumption-based service, Usage-based billing offers:

• Flexible billing: Customers are billed based on actual usage, leading to fairer and more accurate charges.
• Scalability: As usage grows, billing scales automatically, removing the guesswork for businesses.
• Cost efficiency: This model eliminates the need for expensive fixed-rate plans, ensuring customers only pay for what they consume, building trust.

Learn more from our documentation

Explore detailed instructions on how to set up a Usage-based billing model in our support documentation here:

• Step-by-step guides on creating and configuring a Usage-based billing product.
• The various pricing models available for usage-based billing:

1. Per unit (flat pricing)
2. Per unit – Step (graduated pricing)
3. Per tier (volume pricing)
4. Per tier – Step (graduated volume pricing)
5. Percentage (revenue share pricing)
6. Percentage – Step (graduated rev share pricing)

• API integration details and tips for configuring billing for your customers.
• Information on calculating usage using different strategies, such as Sum of All Usages, Maximum of All Usages, and The Latest Usage.

For any questions or feedback to improve or validate the new product feel free to reach out to our support team support@billwerk.com

Contact our sales team for a personalized demo or to discuss how the solution might work for your business.

Billwerk+ will deprecate support for insecure cipher suites. Affected merchants will need to upgrade their TLS library.

DEADLINE: January 6, 2025

If you are using an insecure cipher suite and do not make this update, you’ll no longer be able to use the Billwerk+ API from the deprecation date onward. Notice that is is quite unlikely that you are affected by this change, as only old HTTP client libraries does not support newer more secure ciphers.

Which cipher suites are being deprecated

On or after December 3, 2024, we will be deprecating the following two cipher suites: 

TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256 (0xc027)
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384 (0xc028)

This means that any client with a TLS library that uses one of these cipher suites, and does not support any of the cipher suites that will continue to be supported, will no longer be able to connect to the Billwerk+ API.

Why we are doing this

The cipher suites that we’re deprecating have a historical track record of security weaknesses. They're still vulnerable to attacks that may enable a bad actor to decrypt data. We consider this to be an unacceptable security risk, especially given our commitment to keeping our customers’ data secure.

What happens if a deprecated cipher suite is continued to be used?

If you continue to use one of the cipher suites we’re deprecating, you won’t be able to access the API. HTTP client libraries will fail to establish a TLS connection to our API. 

What cipher suites will be supported after deprecation?

We will continue to support the following cipher suites after deprecation:

• TLS 1.3 (suites in server-preferred order)
  TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 (0x1301)
TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 (0x1302)
TLS_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256 (0x1303)
• TLS 1.2 (suites in server-preferred order)
  TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 (0xc02f)
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 (0xc030)

What action should I take so that I’m not affected?

If you have a direct API integration with the Billwerk+ API:

• Ensure the TLS library you’re using supports one of the ciphers listed above

How can I test to ensure I’m using a supported cipher suite?

You can test by making a GET request to the following endpoint that only supports the cipher suites that will still be available after the deprecation of insecure suites:

https://staging-api.reepay.com/info/

If you receive a 200 OK response with JSON content, your client library is not affected by the change.

Example request with Curl

$ curl https://staging-api.reepay.com/info/
{"app.name": "CoreApiApp", ...}

Dear Valued Customer

In order to enhance security and comply with updated industry regulations, we are introducing a password expiration policy. Gradually introduced over the next three months, all user passwords will expire every 90 days, if two-factor authentication is not enabled for the user.

This change is being implemented to ensure the continued safety and security of your account. Prior to the 90-day expiration, users will receive reminder notifications to update their password when logging in. If logging in after password expiration, the user will be prompted for existing and a new password.

Notice that the password expiration policy is only in effect for users without two-factor authentication enabled.

If you have any questions or need assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact our support team.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation in helping us maintain a secure environment.

Best regards, Billwerk+

We are excited to announce a small but powerful new feature for your hosted checkout pages - Custom Fields! In addition to controlling our standard fields (visibility, mandatory, or optional), you now have the ability to create your own custom fields tailored to your needs.

Product Page

With Custom Fields, you can:

• Create custom sections (e.g., "Car") and name them according to your requirements.
• Add various field types under each section, including text fields, number fields, and checkboxes.

For example, you could create a section called "Car" with fields like "Registration Number," "Brand," "Model," and a checkbox for "Do you want insurance?".

Custom fields will appear on your hosted sign-up page and can be tailored to individual products. Additionally, we've made a small enhancement by refining the header and adding merchant information, such as company name, address, email, and phone number, to the footer. The hosted sign-up page now also shares the same design as the customer portal.

Once a customer completes a purchase, the data entered in these custom fields will be stored as metadata linked to the customer.

Enhance your checkout experience by tailoring it to your customers' specific needs with Custom Fields!

• We're thrilled to announce a powerful new feature in Billwerk that enhances your flexibility: Offline Payment Methods! This new "Custom" payment method empowers you, as a merchant, to create and manage payment options that may not be natively supported by Billwerk. Whether it's bank transfers, checks, or even cash payments, you now have the tools to offer your customers these alternative methods with ease.

Key Features:

• Custom Payment Methods: If Billwerk doesn’t support a specific payment method you want to offer, you can now create it yourself. Customize everything from payment instructions to logos and currencies.
• Flexible Payment Handling: Choose whether Billwerk should automatically mark the invoice as settled upon generation, or set it to pending, allowing you to manually confirm payment once received. This flexibility ensures that you can tailor the payment process to your business needs.
• Enhanced Visibility: The payment instructions you configure will be clearly visible to your customers in both the payment window and on the PDF invoices. Additionally, the logos and payment method names will be displayed in the payment window, ensuring a seamless and professional presentation of your payment options.
• Seamless Integration: The Offline Payment Method feature is API-first, like the rest of the Optimize platform. Automate your payment confirmation process by integrating with your existing payment systems. For instance, if you receive payment data through a webhook or batch file, you can set up middleware to automatically update the invoice status in Billwerk.
  

How to Offer Offline Payment Methods to Your Customers

Once you've configured and enabled your Offline Payment Method, there are two ways to offer it to your customers:

• Enable it in the Payment Window: You can allow your customers to choose the offline payment method themselves directly in the payment window. Simply enable the option, and it will appear alongside other payment methods.
  
  
  
• Manually Add the Payment Method: Alternatively, you can manually assign an offline payment method to a customer in the Optimize Admin. This gives you the control to select the payment method that best fits the customer's needs on a case-by-case basis.
  

Important Reminder:

Remember that transactions processed through offline payment methods require manual verification, as they are not tracked by our system. This feature gives you the control to manage these transactions, whether it's for a bank transfer, check, or any other method you choose to support.

We believe this new feature will significantly enhance your payment flexibility, making it easier than ever to meet your customers’ needs.

Start exploring Offline Payment Methods today and enjoy greater control over how you manage transactions!

feature 

We are excited to announce a new feature: the DATEV export, integrated with Germany's leading accounting software. Understanding that accounting can be a time-consuming task, particularly when reconciling your cash-to-accounting process, we developed the DATEV export to streamline this entire process and enhance your efficiency.

With the new DATEV export, you can seamlessly transfer your financial data from Billwerk+ Optimize to DATEV. This means no more manual data entry or double-checking, saving you valuable time and effort.

The cash-to-accounting process involves recording all financial transactions in your accounting software, including invoices, payments, and credit notes. With the new DATEV export, all this information is automatically transferred, eliminating the risk of errors and ensuring accuracy.

Please reach out to our Customer Care team at, ree-support@billwerk.com if you would like to become a pilot user for this new feature, providing us with the following information to get you set up:

• Datev consultant number
• Datev account number
• SKR 03 or SKR 04
• account length 
• Export interval (monthly, weekly, daily)

You can read more guidance about the feature here.