At Recurly, we’re dedicated to creating best-in-class subscription management tools for our customers. One aspect of subscription management that is particularly meaningful, and challenging, to our customers is ensuring that they are able to properly account for their subscription revenue and close the books quickly and accurately each month.

We’re excited to announce that, beginning today, we’ve taken a significant step to help our customers meet that goal. Recurly now offers revenue recognition functionality that will allow subscription-based businesses to speed up their month-end accounting and reporting processes by creating a revenue amortization schedule for each transaction in Recurly. This allows merchants to break out deferred and recognized revenue each month, which saves a tremendous amount of time when closing the books.

Here’s how it works:

When you set up a plan in Recurly, you’ll choose the schedule under which you want to recognize revenue—for example daily, at the start of the billing cycle, or at the end. For each subscription charge, add-on, or one-time charge, you can recognize revenue over a period of time or on a specific date. For one-time charges, you can choose specific dates on which to recognize revenue.

Plan Creation / Edit Page

Plan Fee screen

Subscription Creation / Edit Page

Plan Details screen on the Recurly software

Throughout the month, as Recurly bills your customers, our system will generate revenue amortization schedules for each charge to your customers. At the end of the month, Recurly will produce a report that will allow you to sum the deferred and recognized revenue over time. You can use this to prepare your month-end revenue journal entries.

Export Site Data on the Recurly software

Once you have this export, the process of calculating deferred and recognized revenue is more accurate and less time-consuming.

Download our revenue recognition data sheet to learn more. Or contact us to see how revenue recognition can work for your subscription business.