Switching from an In-House Billing System to Unlock Efficiency at Scale: The Mediality Story

The Mediality Group is a trusted media services firm formed from the Australian Associated Press (AAP), Australia's independent newswire service since 1935. It consists of four divisions: Medianet, offering PR tools for brands and journalists; Mediaverse, a media intelligence agency serving government departments, nonprofits, and large companies; Mediality Racing, providing accurate racing and sports data; and Pagemasters, offering media services for businesses of all sizes.

The Problem

Initially, Mediality built an in-house system to manage its clients' recurring billing and subscriptions. They connected this system and their ERP (Microsoft Dynamics GP). It was functional, but the team ran into frequent challenges:

• They couldn't automate many invoicing and accounting activities, forcing manual adjustments and verification.

• Exploring different pricing models seemed effort-intensive, and even the slightest of inadvertent errors could hamper 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, assigning scores to different vendors against each aspect. They narrowed the search down to Chargebee, Recurly, and Stripe Billing and ultimately chose Chargebee as their trusted partner.

"After a thorough evaluation, we selected Chargebee as our ideal subscription and billing software. It offers flexible subscription models and rapid market deployment, allowing us to implement various pricing models across different divisions. Chargebee provides excellent maintenance, high availability, and reliable support services. With regular updates and new features, it enhances our operational efficiency and benefits 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: “Chargebee has significantly reduced our development costs by eliminating the need to deploy our engineering resources for building and maintaining our subscription engine. Additionally, its constant product innovation and expanding pool of integrations provide us with 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.