Zuora Toolbox is developed by keylight, the German Zuora implementation partner. keylight’s mission is to blur the dividing lines between business and IT. In subscription economy, keylight stands for frictionless integration of various IT systems to optimally support individual business cases.

Zuora provides a powerful architecture for managing subscription businesses. keylight’s Zuora Toolbox connects to this infrastructure and provides tools for handling processes that require external logic and depend on external systems. A widget-based user interface allows for quick and easy configuration of the tools. The toolbox is developed for Zuora customers and it is inspired by actual common use cases. Its tools reflect best practices and insights gained from several Zuora implementations. The project is still being actively developed and maintained.

Zuora takes care of correct invoicing and allows to apply external payments and to process electronic payments, for example credit cards or SEPA direct debit. This tool is about automating processes for cases when customers do not pay invoices within a given time frame or when electronic payments fail. A dunning process has different dunning levels that progress over time. A level is characterized by the number of days since the dunning process has been initiated. When an invoice enters a new level, actions associated with this level will be triggered. Possible actions are:

• apply a late, penalty, or chargeback fee
• generate a dunning letter in PDF format
• send an e-mail to the customer
• send a webhook notification to another system, for example to terminate a service
• cancel the subscription in Zuora

When integrating SEPA direct debit, it is necessary to handle SEPA prenotification messages to inform customers that payments are due. Without implementing these notifications, the service will not be SEPA compliant. The following rules hold and need to be implemented:

• for a SEPA direct debit payment, the exact due date for the transaction and the transaction amount need to be announced to the customer not more than 14 days before the transaction is processed
• according to SEPA Core 1 such notification for a single transaction needs to be sent at least 1 day before processing
• according to SEPA Core the notification for a single transaction needs to be sent at least 2 day before processing, and 5 days when the mandate is used for the first time
• in case of subscriptions and recurring payments, it is allowed to send only a single notification before the first transaction is processed
• this “recurring notification“ is possible if and only if the transaction amount will not change and the transactions will occur in regular intervals
• recurring notifications ask for 2 days lead time

Zuora provides a powerful accounting engine that addresses the challenges of subscription business for finance professionals. Zuora acts as a subledger and generates summary journal entries according to a customizable segmentation to stay aligned with the general ledger. The GL Export tool provides an additional configuration logic that allows a detailed mapping of the summary journal entries to parent accounts in the GL and an automated export into a compliant format for DATEV, Lexware, and other finance software.