Most businesses don’t like their billing system, and for good reason. We recently polled more than 2,500 companies of all sizes: 40% said they’ve lost deals because of the inflexibility of their billing system, and 70% said they’ve held off on global expansion because their billing system can’t support it. In other words, a bad billing system is not only a drag to work with, it’s also a material obstacle to your business’s growth.

Given this, you’d think businesses would be trying to switch left and right. But billing systems are incredibly hard to migrate off of, because they’re so intertwined with every part of your product and your customer experience.

So many of you have asked us for help migrating to Stripe Billing that we’ve decided to treat migration as part of the product experience. Last month we announced a new Billing migration toolkit designed to address your top pain points: engineering resourcing, the risk of disruptive errors, and migration time. Here’s how the migration toolkit addresses each.

Fewer engineering resources needed

You’ve told us that migrating off your billing provider will divert engineering resources away from your core product development, so we’ve made it possible to migrate to Billing with a completely no-code interface. You can access the newly released Billing migration toolkit through a no-code dashboard and begin uploading existing subscriptions in a predefined .csv format. 

Following the upload, Stripe validates the file to ensure that it is in the correct .csv format. This saves hours of engineering effort that previously went into creating manual validation scripts.

Lower risk of error

You’ve told us that you’re worried a migration will disrupt your end customers or cost you revenue. This leaves you weighing these risks against the upside of a better billing system.

That’s why we’ve designed our migration toolkit to automatically validate that subscriptions are mapped to customers. The toolkit features preemptive migration controls through the Subscription Schedule API, which runs automatically in the background, and verifies scheduled subscriptions before subscriptions are live. This allows you to directly roll back scheduled subscriptions from the toolkit in case of any unintended errors. The validation process—built on top of the upcoming invoice API—involves:

• Field-level validations to check if a value exists and is accurate (e.g., if a customer ID mentioned in the .csv exists or not)
• Conditional validations to make sure that the migrated fields match the components of the subscription creation (e.g., the toolkit makes sure that if the collection method is via an invoice, the customer has an attached email address where the invoice can be sent)
• Date validations to make sure dates match subscription anchors and multiple date fields are not conflicting (e.g., the toolkit makes sure a monthly subscription has a billing cycle anchor that is actually a month)

It also cuts down on validation time by generating a list of errors all at once, so you don’t have to engage in multiple validation cycles.

Faster migrations

You’ve told us that even in the best of circumstances, migrations take a long time. Manual migrations can take months, but the no-code Billing migration toolkit can migrate a batch of 100,000 subscriptions in approximately 30 minutes thanks to:

• A central list view where you can create, track, and manage multiple migrations 
• Out-of-the-box migration output, which features a standardized migration .csv to map the migrated Stripe data with source data and metadata fields for quick cross-referencing

The migration toolkit currently supports a maximum batch size of 500,000 subscriptions (up to 120MB) and 20 million subscriptions in total per merchant account.

“People were opposed to the idea of migrating to a new billing system because we had been using our previous solution for almost 12 years and there were a lot of systems built on top of it,” said Rafay Korai, head of B2C marketing at Mindvalley, which used the Billing migration toolkit to migrate more than 150,000 subscribers with no errors. “Writing our own scripts would have added a level of complexity, so the Billing migration toolkit was really helpful.”

Your billing system should enable growth, not impede it

The Billing migration toolkit makes it easy for businesses to turn billing into a primary enabler of revenue expansion. With our comprehensive migration methodology, you can efficiently transition to Stripe Billing, benefitting from streamlined processes and guides and taking advantage of all the innovative revenue models Billing supports.

You can migrate your existing subscriptions to Stripe Billing using the migration toolkit. If you have any questions or feedback, we’d love to hear from you.