What Are Recurring Payments?
Recurring payments, also known as automatic or periodic payments, are a payment arrangement where a specific amount of money is automatically charged to a customer's credit card, debit card, or bank account at regular intervals. These payments can be set up to occur on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis, depending on the terms of the agreement.
If you’re a business owner or you make business decisions in your workplace, recurring payments can be an essential part of your business, or they may be something you’d like to add to your business to increase revenue. Recurring payments are great for business, but they do come with complexities, like processing these regular payments, maintaining communication with your customers and keeping them on track to paying you.
Recurring payments can come in many forms depending on your business. Examples of recurring payments include membership payments (such as gyms, sports teams, clubs), retainer fees from clients (often used by freelancers or agencies), subscription payments (these come in many forms such as gift box subscriptions, news subscriptions, weekly food deliveries) and service fees (weekly cleaning, bi-annual car servicing, nannying). Recurring payments are simply payments that continue over a set period, and in return, the customer receives a service or product.
Recurring payments come in many forms, but they all share the same complexities when processing payments. The complexities continue when businesses offer add-on services to the base of their recurring payments- like if a cleaning service offered a deep clean option every six months or you wanted to add a monthly PT session to your gym membership.
Maintaining a recurring payment can be a challenge for businesses. Without using a dedicated platform, many businesses are left to manually process these fees as well as manually send communications around the payment and, in many cases, picking up the phone to discuss failed payments with clients. This often results in a lot of dedicated time to maintain this revenue stream and unnecessary work.
That’s why Billycart was created. Billycart aims to end the complexity around recurring payments through:
- Easy to set up payment templates
- Automated failed payment recovery
- Automated communication through SMS and email
- Optional one-off payments
- Fast integration with your payment provider
- Low monthly fees for businesses
Recurring payments don’t have to be difficult, they can be seamless with the right software and support. Billycart handles the complexities so you can work on the other aspects of your business.
Katie Norbury
January 3, 2023