Automating Subscription Renewals

You know that gym membership you forgot to cancel?  Or that streaming service you haven't watched in months? Now imagine that happening at a company.  Except the cost isn't $15/month. It's thousands of dollars. And it's so easy to fall into that trap: ➡️ A business signs up for a tool, stops using it and finance has no idea. ➡️The person who owned the subscription contract leaves, and the bill keeps getting paid without due diligence. This is exactly where most AI solutions fall short. Forward-thinking finance leaders are investing in AI that drives outcomes: ✅ Automatically extracting contract terms with no manual entry ✅ Proactively alerting teams before critical renewal dates ✅ Identifying real savings opportunities across vendor relationships ✅ Providing actionable negotiation insights, not just reminders Without a system to track and act on who owns what, how do you even know what to cancel or renew? That's why what Stackpack has built is amazing! Their tool doesn't just centralize vendor data, but actually takes action - sending notices, extracting contract terms, and preventing those costly auto-renewals that slip through the cracks. Every dollar wasted on an unused tool is a dollar that could be invested elsewhere. What's your process for catching these before they add up?

How are you managing renewals in Salesforce? When data is scattered and tracking relies on manual processes, it's no surprise that 71% of companies can’t locate at least 10% of their contracts. Worse yet, 78% don’t have a systematic way to track their obligations, leading to lost revenue and missed opportunities. But what if there’s a better way to manage this? Let’s automate your renewal process in Salesforce and ensure you never miss those crucial dates. No more relying on spreadsheets or manual tracking. With Clientell AI, you can easily set up a flow that automatically generates a new renewal opportunity whenever an existing deal is marked Closed Won. This ensures your renewals are tracked and managed seamlessly, without the stress of manual follow-ups. Here’s how you can do it: Prompt: Create a flow that generates a new opportunity in the same account whenever an opportunity is moved to closed won. The name of the new opportunity will be the name of the existing opportunity + “renewal,” set the close date 1 year from now, and assign the same owner as the existing opportunity. Once the flow is set up, you’ll be able to track your upcoming renewals with ease. Within a few seconds, you can create a report that shows all opportunities with a close date in the next 30 days and includes “renewal” in the name, keeping your renewals on track and visible at all times. Here’s how you can do it: Prompt: Create a report to show me all opportunities that have a close date in the next 30 days and whose name contains “renewal.” Group this report by opportunity owner. Include the following fields in the report: Opportunity name, Owner, Close Date, Amount. With this automation in place, you’ll never miss a renewal again. Stay ahead of the game, prevent revenue leakage, and gain real-time visibility into your renewals effortlessly. #Salesforce #RevOps #SalesOps #SalesforceAdmins #AIAgents #Clientell

One of the most common mistakes HubSpot admins make when automating renewals is overlooking HubSpot’s built-in infinite loop protection. By default, a workflow won’t re‑enrol a deal it created even if that deal meets the enrolment criteria again. You often don’t spot the problem until after the first renewal, by which time your onboarding team have long gone. Here’s what happens: 1️⃣ You mark a new business deal as Closed Won 2️⃣ Your “create renewal” workflow fires and creates a renewal deal 12 or 24 months ahead 3️⃣ When that renewal deal later reaches Closed Won, it still meets the criteria, but because it was created by that workflow, it wont trigger any actions. 4️⃣ You never get a second renewal record and your pipeline stops after one cycle A simple fix: 1️⃣ Add a dropdown property called Renewal Flag with two options, A and B 2️⃣ Duplicate your create renewal workflow into two versions: 3️⃣ Workflow A enrols when Deal Stage is Closed Won and Renewal Flag is A; it creates the renewal deal and sets its Renewal Flag to B 4️⃣ Workflow B enrols when Deal Stage is Closed Won and Renewal Flag is B; it creates the renewal deal and sets its Renewal Flag to A 5️⃣ Seed all new business deals with Renewal Flag = A By alternating between A and B on each renewal, each workflow only ever sees deals it didn’t create, so HubSpot’s infinite‑loop protection never blocks you, and you get every renewal, every time.

I was to design a dynamic seat-based subscription model for an application only to realize that none of the big payment gateways in Nigeria support this with automatic renewals. Here's what I did: A seat-based subscription model is the type used by platforms like GitHub or Jira where you’re billed based on the number of users (or “seats”) you add to your team. The more seats, the more you pay. Global payment gateways like Stripe support this natively, but one of the business requirements was to stick to gateways in Africa. So I had to design it myself. Here’s how I approached it: - Worked with stakeholders to define pricing plans and what each plan offers per user - On subscription, collected the number of users, selected plan, and billing interval from the client - Calculated the total amount, charged the user, and after a successful charge, extracted and stored the authorization details amongst other data securely - Calculated the next billing date based on their interval (monthly or yearly) I then set up cron jobs to: - Check when the next renewal is due - Recalculate the number of seats - Use the saved authorization details to charge again - Update the next billing date If a renewal failed: - Sent emails to inform the user - Generated a one-time payment link for them - Retried a fixed number of times - If all retries failed, auto-cancelled the subscription and notified the user I also built services for: - Cancelling, restarting, upgrading, and downgrading subscriptions - Restricting seat addition based on their active plan It was a bit complex to design and set up manually, but it gave us full control over billing logic and how we manage seats per team. If there’s any payment gateway in Africa that already supports this kind of model, I’d love to know. #softwareengineers #tech #systemdesign