Manage Sales Tax Yourself or Using a 3rd Party Service

Connect:SM Professional allows you to self-manage sales tax rates for your products or integrate with a 3rd party sales tax service that keeps your rates up-to-date for everywhere you sell. Additionally, Connect:SM Professional enables you to assign tax rates at the line level in multi-level product packages and bundles so only the individual items that are taxable get taxed. If you sell outside the United States, Connect:SM Professional can support you with international taxation features such as support for any location or jurisdiction, including support for European VAT, GST, and other types of international taxes and fees.

More Control and Choice in Billing and Payment Configuration

Connect:SM Professional enables you to do more through configuration options and custom fields. Support is provided for entering and tracking sales and marketing segments, account level activity memos with triggers, product packaging, bundles, promotions, and discount schemes, and personalized billing and payment options by customer or group of customers to name just a few.

Prepay, Post-pay, and Micro-transaction Support

Real-time balance management capabilities allow customers to charge against their prepaid or authorized credit balance until they reach a configurable threshold for refreshing (topping up) their credit balance. Configuration options are provided to establish how to handle uncompleted transactions that cross the threshold to ensure customer satisfaction.

Connect:SM Professional Edition enables you to accept transactions that normally would be too small in amount to handle via your established payment methods. Micro-transactions support is provided in conjunction with the real-time balance management functionality to enable the aggregation of small charges to an account based on a prepaid balance or authorized credit limit. Micro-transactions with balance management support can be combined with other payment methods on individual accounts, or any other grouping parameter, and is supported in the optional n-tier account hierarchy structure.

Expand Your Market with Multiple Currency Support

With the optional Multiple Currency capabilities, Connect:SM Professional Edition can be implemented using different native currencies, and provides support for pricing individual products and services in multiple currencies. This enables customers to extend individual subscription products to international markets priced in the native currency. For example, a subscription product could have pricing defined in dollars, yen, and euros, and configured to offer the product in the appropriate currency based on the customer's location.

Support for Complex Account Hierarchies for Multi-Level Subscription Plans

Complex recurring billing for multi-level subscription programs and plans such as reseller programs, corporate accounts, partners, and family plans is supported via the optional Connect:SM Professional Edition's n-tier account hierarchy structure. Features include data security, custom branding at different levels in the hierarchy, custom billing and pricing based on level, custom usage presentment based on level, CSR support at all levels, and hierarchy support for reporting and analytics.

Usage Processing for Simple or Complex Recurring Transactions

Connect:SM Professional Edition supports usage-based pricing and charging in addition to one-time and recurring charge transactions. Usage records can be based on any metered usage metric such as time on a site, gigabytes of data, number of reports generated, miles driven, events processed, or any other unit of measure.

Support All One-time and Recurring Payment Methods

Connect:SM Professional Edition supports all types of one-time and recurring payment methods including cash, check, ACH, electronic check, credit card, debit card, and lockbox, and can integrate via API with a wide variety of domestic and international ISOs, payment processors and gateways, including Authorize.net, CyberSource, PayPal, NMI, Merchant e-Solutions, Teledraft, Transcom, and others. We offer a range of optional services including credit authorization and address verification to address special requirements. Like all Connect:SM for Cloud Commerce Editions, the Professional Edition is PCI compliant and hosted in a SAS 70 certified data center.

Reliable, Automated Recurring Payment Processing and Payment Gateway Support

Support is provided for most major electronic or online payment methods with integration to the leading 3rd party ISOs, payment processors and gateways such as Authorize.net, CyberSource, PayPal, NMI, Merchant e-Solutions, Teledraft, Transcom, and others. Offline payment handling for cash and checks is also included.

Support is provided to schedule and automate recurring payment runs for different types of payment methods, and to anticipate and handle failed electronic payment scenarios such as those typically found with ACH and credit card processing. Reporting is available to assist in managing the payment process and quickly identify exceptions.

Personalize Subscriber Payment Options Through Configuration

Recurring payment configuration options are provided to define how you want recurring payments to work for particular subscription products and services and also for individual customers or groups of customers. The optional, full n-tier account hierarchy structure support is provided to define where in the hierarchy payment is expected and includes roll-up capability for payment tracking and reporting within the hierarchy. This is helpful for reseller relationships, corporate accounts, and family plans.

Payments can be one-time or recurring. You can configure frequencies such as on-demand, on-cycle, or threshold. Recurring payments can be fixed, variable or usage-based. They can be done in advance or in arrears, as well as using balance forward or open item. Support is provided for partial payments, credits and adjustments, and a host of miscellaneous fees such as finance or late charges.

Stay in Control of Receivables & Collections

Extending credit in a high volume, recurring revenue business can be tricky and requires sound receivable and collection capabilities and processes to ensure payments are received in a timely manner and manage service continuation when they are not.

Connect SM Professional Edition offers the ability to define different classes of account receivable rules that can be applied to individual customers or groups of customers. This enables the business to personalize how they handle the credit process for their different customers. Configuration options are provided for the amount of credit to extend, how accounts receivable is categorized, and how the collections workflow is handled.

Automate Collections Workflow

Collection workflow management is handled in conjunction with accounts receivable classification and payment terms. Connect SM Professional Edition provides configuration options for dunning rules which include event triggers and notice frequency and timing.

The memo capability provided for each account in Connect SM Professional Edition gives employees the ability to capture each interaction with the customer as a permanent record as well as to establish action triggers based on the type of interaction.

One-time and Recurring Payment Integration

Integration options are available for both upstream and downstream external capabilities associated with the one-time and recurring payment processes. These include payment gateways and processors, lockbox services, credit authorization services, address verification, address update services for credit cards, ACH, wire transfers, collection agencies, and others.

When Simple is Not Enough - Configurable Workflow & Business Rules

Connect:SM Professional Edition includes more configuration control over workflow to enable businesses to adapt ordering, subscription billing and recurring payment workflow processes based on their individual requirements. Note: Direct customer access to the workflow and rules engine capabilities requires the Connect:SM Enterprise edition.

Inventory Control

The optional integrated Inventory Control module supports serialized goods, as well as physical and virtual goods. It provides for multiple inventory locations and tracks movement. All features are seamlessly available at appropriate points throughout Connect:SM for Cloud Commerce. Capabilities include manufacturer and model tracking, write-offs, revenue and GL account assignment, warranty information, returns, exchanges, transfers, product history tracking, location tracking, and support for selling, renting or leasing, as well as taking deposits or providing insurance or maintenance plans.