Jump to a chapter: Bulk updates · Text reminders · Processing fees · MRR and NRR · Search · Redesigned pages · Your questions
We ran our first Drilldown on September 16, and more of you showed up than we'd planned for. Chris Dub hosted. He's run customer success here for nine years, so if you've ever filed a ticket you've talked to him, and this was the first time most of you had seen him outside one.
The Drilldown is a live hour, once a month, for customers. We show you what shipped and what's about to. You tell us what you think and what you want next. Then those requests go into the same log that decides what we build, which is how you got better A/R aging reports earlier this year after about 40 of you asked for them.
The first one covered seven things. Below is why we built each of them, with the clip from the session if you want to see it in action. The full recording is at the top of the page, and the step-by-step for every feature is in the Help Center.
Bulk updates
Every fall we hear the same thing. Someone has 400 subscriptions, prices need to go up January 1, and the plan is to open each one in December and change it by hand. That's a week of clicking, and it's the kind of week where one wrong keystroke turns into a billing error you find out about from a customer.
So we built a bulk update tool. You download a CSV that already has every subscription line in it, fill in a date and a new price, upload it, and check the preview before anything changes. It runs across all 400 in a minute or two and shows you which rows succeeded and which didn't. We also snapshot everything first, so if it goes wrong, we can put it back.
Scheduled price increases are the first thing people have used it for, but it works on customers, invoices, and custom fields too. Next on our list for it is clearing a field to blank, so you can retire a custom field you no longer use.
Watch the clip for the full walkthrough, including the one detail about recurring percentage increases that trips people up. Help Center: Bulk update tool
Text reminders for invoices
A lot of past-due invoices aren't disputed. They're unread. The email landed on a Tuesday, got buried by Thursday, and now it's 30 days out and someone has to make an awkward call.
Texts get read. So you can now send invoices, due notices, and past-due notices by SMS, either one at a time or automatically from your dunning settings. The customers already running it are seeing the biggest difference on the reminder that goes out a few days after a missed payment date, which is exactly the invoice that used to sit.
We built consent into it from the start. Your customers opt in from the payment page, the portal, or a signup page, and a STOP reply opts them out on the spot. If you already have consent from another system, we can bring those contacts over.
The clip shows what the text looks like on a phone and where the opt-in lives. Help Center: SMS invoice reminders · Why consent matters when texting customers about late invoices
Processing fees, sorted by payment type
Surcharging rules keep changing, and the one most people miss is that the card networks treat debit differently from credit. If you pass fees through and don't separate the two, you can end up out of step with the card networks without knowing it.
Credit card, ACH, and tokenized payments now each have their own fee setting, and debit cards are exempt by default. State exemptions still work the way they did. You shouldn't have to track card network rules to get paid, so we're trying to keep the defaults on the right side of them for you.
The MRR report you can send to your boss
The MRR Summary report had one date range and no export, which meant the person who most wanted to see it (the owner, the CFO, the board member) either needed a ChargeOver login or a screenshot from you every month.
Now you can pick any date range, save a filtered view as its own report, and schedule it to land in someone's inbox with the Excel file attached. And at the bottom is net revenue retention, a number we should have shown you years ago since we already had every input for it. Over 100% means your existing customers are spending more with you than they were. Under 100% means the base is shrinking even if new sales look fine. It's the number investors ask for first, and now it's on the page.
This is the first piece of a larger MRR overhaul. Help Center: MRR Summary report
Search you can find
For years we had a search box that was a small magnifying glass icon, and we kept getting support tickets asking whether ChargeOver had search at all. We'd watch people on screen-share calls scroll a customer list looking for a name that was one search away.
There's a search bar in the top left of every page now, and it suggests customers and contacts as you type. There's a second one in the Report Center, which matters if you're one of the accounts with a hundred custom reports. And there's a third inside the Columns picker on every list page, so you can find the one field you want to show instead of scrolling for it.
The first feedback on it came in the morning of the Drilldown. One customer wants active or inactive status shown in the results, because duplicate customers look identical without it. We logged it that day, and we want more like it.
The pages you live in, redesigned
The customer, subscription, invoice, payment, and quote pages are where most of you spend most of your day, and the changes here came from watching you use them. People clicked the customer name when they meant the subscription, so the subscription number is now first and labeled. People lost their place scrolling long lists, so the header and footer stay put. The customer page got the same card layout as the subscription page, and contacts are editable right on it.
A batch of these came from one customer's feedback, which is the point of the Drilldown. What we'd like to do next is adjustable column widths and drag-to-reorder, so the data you care about sits where you want it.
What you asked
The questions came in faster than we could answer them, which is the best thing that happened all hour. We took a few live. Does search cover products yet? Not yet, and we want the use case. Can you set a minimum charge on an invoice total instead of a line item? Not yet, and we like the idea. How often do we ship? Every other week at minimum, and more often lately.
One customer asked for advance notice before reports change, because their internal processes depend on them. Fair. We don't have a process for that today and we're working on one.
Everything we didn't get to is being answered by email. If you asked anonymously and want your name on a request, write to support@chargeover.com and we'll attach it.
Until next time
That's the first one. Thank you to everyone who showed up, stayed for the hour, and kept the questions coming. A lot of what you saw in this session started as a request from a customer, and the next session will too.
We'll be back with another Drilldown soon, and we'll send the details once they're set. In the meantime, send one thing you'd like ChargeOver to build, improve, or cover in a future session to support@chargeover.com. You use this every day, so you know better than anyone where it should go next.
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