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Maxio Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 8.8 out of 10
Score
8.8 out of 10

Reviews

25 Reviews

Somewhat expensive solution to revenue recognition

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Maxio to help us recognize revenue and track ARR. Maxio generated journal entries that made it easy to recognize revenue in QuickBooks Online, as well as easy reporting for understanding churn and concentration.

Pros

  • Generates journal entries for SaaS revenue recognition
  • Creates reports over time for SaaS metrics
  • Sends invoices

Cons

  • Reporting is a bit clunky to use and to export - more work is required to manipulate the data afterwards in Google Sheets
  • Definitely a learning curve and a long onboarding process

Likelihood to Recommend

For us as a SaaS startup this simplified our revenue recognition and ensured we were GAAP compliant. It's possible for larger companies, this can be done by bookkeepers or more advanced QBO knowledge.

AR
Aviva Rosman
Head of Revenue in Corporate at BallotReady (11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified on LinkedIn

Great tool for SAAS businesses

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Maxio to bill our customers with their subscriptions, so we use it for billing purposes. We also use Maxio for reporting and metrics.

Pros

  • Billing subscriptions
  • Metrics
  • Products list & discount

Cons

  • Pro-forma invoices
  • Modify invoices (instead of voiding when there's a mistake)
  • Xero integration

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited for all SAAS businesses, but if you are integrated with Xero, it has big limitations and we are dealing with a lot of trouble on a daily basis. Otherwise, the Maxio site itself is great and has nice features.

VU
Verified User
Employee in Finance and Accounting (11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Maxio
6 years of experience

10 months of an onboarding nightmare

Rating: 1 out of 10

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We signed up for Maxio because we needed more billing features and flexibility. We were using QBO and SamCart (and still use them in some capacity). However, we were using QBO for our custom contracts for [...] and QBO doesn't have a PCI-compliant signup page for customers and lacks the ability to autobill customers for the duration of their contract. SamCart offers the PCI-compliant signup page but lacks the ability to create custom contracts (flexible on duration and amount) under a singular product. We also were looking for a solution for billing for our usage-based software business (...).

Pros

  • The Maxio interface (excluding SaaSOptics) is clean.
  • Our experience was so bad that it pushed us to find another solution and we found Chargebee. In my opinion, they have been amazing and have accomplished in 4 weeks what took Maxio 10 months.

Cons

  • We are a small company and the onboarding process took over 10 months to complete.
  • The Maxio billing API is a nightmare for us. We have a usage-based billing product that consistently showed issues (incorrect invoices) every single month we used Maxio. Our developer is a former Google dev and expressed that he has never been more frustrated with a company than he was with Maxio. His points below:
  • No Golang API.
  • He felt their API was poorly documented and things had to be guessed.
  • Everyone is enrolled in everything, just use a non-zero usage to activate. In my experience, this made it impossible to indicate programmatically that there was no usage but should be a default bill, so I needed to send 1 when 0 was the usage AND I needed to remember which service the customer was using.
  • Time zones never did get figured out. Eventually we abandoned recording usage on the first & last day of the month.
  • Highest-day-billed is not an available feature set, which meant yet another thing our billing integration had to take care of.
  • For us, there was little time to verify the bills before they went out. It did not appear configurable
  • In my opinion, Consultants seemed to struggle with their own system.
  • In our experience, there was effectively no way to 'dry-run' without changing all the parameters for a shorter time period which then work differently. It effectively required building an unrelated system which we had no time for.
  • Negative usages horror: you can't correct something day-by-day, because if it ever goes below zero (when sending a negative usage update) then it would keep it at 0, so, for us, this required managing all usage records at once for a customer.
  • In our experience, usage queries returned every record for a user forever, so filtering was a chore, especially considering the time zone mess. Queries were required to set usage to match our system because you couldn't just express a value: it was always an accumulation.
  • Maxio used Guide CX for our onboarding checklist. We found it was a confusing list and the descriptions for each item were blank (zero help documentation and zero context). We were told after a month or so that the onboarding template we were using wasn't even applicable to our business and they would need to update it.
  • We found it nearly impossible to get in touch with management when our implementation consultant for the first 6 months was negligent and refused to communicate. He was eventually replaced.
  • With both the old and new implementation consultants, the only way we had a record of meeting notes and action items (including things that needed to be done on Maxio's end) was if WE took the notes and emailed them the action items. On many occasions, it took multiple emails from us with the same action items to get anything accomplished.
  • We wanted to migrate our existing customers over in bulk (from QuickBooks and SamCart) and avoid having them re-submit credit card info and we were told in the sales call that this was both possible and easy. Three months post-sales call, we were unable to get ahold of the technical solutions consultant who promised the easy solution and had still not migrated our customers due to the implementation consultant telling us the bulk migration was difficult and cumbersome. We ended up going the exact route we didn't want to take and spent 10s of hours migrating customers manually and asking them to re-submit their credit card information via the public signup pages.
  • Our product catalog was built entirely wrong at the advice of the implementation consultant and had to be completely rebuilt. We had no revenue visibility for 8 months other than the lump sum.
  • In our experience, we waited weeks for responses from everyone we spoke to at Maxio.
  • We weren't instructed that we needed to enable 3D Secure in Braintree, which lead to a host of client issues with the public signup pages, multiple support tickets dragged out over weeks, and thousands of dollars of lost revenue.
  • We found that the only way to triage our clients' tech issues was by asking them to complete technical tasks beyond their understanding (screenshotting their browser console, for example), which left them frustrated and waiting sometimes multiple weeks for answers.
  • We were told we could use the SaaSOptics / Quickbooks integration to make life easier for our accountant. After 4 months of asking about it, we were finally told that, since we had two business entities in one account, we would have to pick only one instance to connect to QuickBooks. For the other business, we would have to export an invoice CSV file and manually upload to QuickBooks. We were also advised that the QuickBooks connection was clunky and not recommended.
  • SaaSOptics was a nightmare for us to use and resulted in a lot of frustration. It was difficult for us to produce even a simple revenue report. We found this out after a few weeks of Maxio debating internally on whether or not revenue reports were even included in our $600/month plan.
  • The only way to customize the public signup pages was by altering the JavaScript.
  • For products with components, the client has to specify a quantity of "1" for each component of the plan on the public signup page. If they screw this up, they are either overcharged (if >1 for each component is chosen) or the component has to then be manually added to their account. The only way to lock the values of components on a public signup page is by using JavaScript.
  • There is no option for cash-based accounting, only accrual.
  • The implementation consultant wanted to speak with our accountant regarding a QuickBooks item sync and a few other items involving monthly tasks for the accountant. We don't have a full-time accountant, meetings with outside softwares is not factored into our accounting package, and we certainly weren't factoring in the extra expense of training an accountant on a new software.
  • In our experience, for more complicated products with multiple components or billing scenarios, testing was limited. With an API as complicated as Maxio's, we really needed a feature like Chargebee's "time machine" to ensure our products and components were working properly.
  • Because the implementation dragged out to almost a year, one of my most talented employees was constantly tied up in communications, troubleshooting, and firefighting. This was expensive monetarily... but more importantly, it was a HUGE misallocation of her considerable talent. Other projects that she was working on dragged out because of this, in my opinion, absolute joke of a company.

Likelihood to Recommend

In my opinion, Maxio is well suited for a large company with simple products/billing scenarios and 10s of thousands of dollars available to waste on implementation, learning curve, and mistakes. For any other company, I do not advise purchasing Maxio.

DP
Daniel Patterson
CEO (Chief Executive Officer) in Corporate at Grow Your Music Studio & Piano Express (1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Maxio
1 year of experience

SaaSOptics doesn't understand its customers and product development is off track

Rating: 3 out of 10

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SaaSOptics (SO) integrates with our CRM (Salesforce) and our GL accounting software (Quickbooks Online; QBO). I inherited this software from several predecessors before me. SO mainly serves as an intermediary between our CRM and GL to keep track of our customers, send invoices and perform collections and dunning, maintains our revenue and deferred revenue schedules and ARR reporting so we don't have to use Excel. Not having to keep track of all of this in Excel is a huge benefit for us and allows us to delegate the bookings process to a lower level staff member. The automated emails when an invoice becomes past due (or any other time period you set) is helpful as well. SO can also sync sales tax settings from QBO so we properly charge sales tax to our customers.

Pros

  • Integrates with CRM (Salesforce) and accounting software, and keeps our team out of Excel for revenue and deferred revenue
  • Provides assistance with automating our AR collections process
  • The Quickbooks Online (QBO) and SaaSOptics (SO) sales tax integration seems to work well (with the help of a sales tax consultant) and allows us to stay organized enough that we haven’t needed to implement another software like Avalara
  • You can easily export a Transaction List of all transactions in the system
  • You can set up a parent/child relationships to get more accurate ARR reporting at the customer account level and customer count level.
  • The ability to set up and allow customers to make payments by ACH and credit card through the Stripe integration was easy to set up. It does take 2 days for credit card payments to hit your bank account though, and you can’t pass along the credit card fees to your customers (some states don’t allow passing along the fees to customers).

Cons

  • I can barely use the full functionality of the software because of reporting and transaction issues that are not easy to resolve, and appear to be system limitations. For example, the cohort report doesn’t make any sense, the gross renewal and reports are completely inaccurate, and they still haven’t created an accurate, standard MRR and ARR report (order dates before the subscription period could result in overlapping transactions, which will be excluded from the ARR report, so your ARR is understated and you could make uninformed decisions)
  • You cannot renew transactions between customers, which is a total pain. There is very little guidance on how to handle mergers and acquisitions and there has been a significant amount of M&A in the market lately. Their customer support says you need to move the invoices to the new customer in your GL system, but I don’t want to change any historical information that could potentially change our audited financials.
  • It is too easy to make mistakes and not understand or realize where and how the issue was created and how to resolve it
  • There is very limited information (MRR and ARR at End of Month, and Total AR Balance, which isn’t groundbreakingly helpful) you can send from SaaSOptics to Salesforce, and the Salesforce IDs can easily change without you knowing, which stops the information from flowing from SaaSOptics to Salesforce
  • They have a Dropbox functionality to save executed contracts, but I think it would be better to store them in your CRM where the sales, AM, and CS teams can access the docs instead of trying to teach your team members how to us SaaSOptics.
  • They have a Clearbit integration to get more detailed information about your customer, but I haven’t set this up, and am unsure why you would use it if your CRM already imports information from ZoomInfo
  • They don’t have an integration with Bill.com, so I don’t understand how they expect customers to use their expense module
  • There is no need to use their expense module for 606 commissions if you already have a commission software that can handle 606. I haven’t had to implement 606 on the revenue side, but that seems to be a more practical use case.
  • You can’t natively integrate with a customer success software, like ChurnZero. You need to hire a developer or pay more.
  • It is difficult to collaborate and share reports with other parties. Their reports doesn’t export cleanly either and requires additional Excel manipulation. There is no multi-year reporting without creating custom fields and additional data entry. You can’t easily create a bookings report based on the order date or signed date, which could be different than the subscription start date.
  • The granularity of security settings is not great and they don’t help you organize and direct users to use the software. My preference would be to not have any report users in the system.
  • There are poor notifications about invoice issues. For example, our AR invoice email keeps getting unsubscribed when we want to have a copy of the invoice saved in our email to prove it was sent. If an invoice is rejected or kicked back, then you will not know until the invoice becomes past due and you start investigating why your customer hasn’t paid you yet.
  • Invoice template changes impact all previous invoices, which doesn’t make sense and distorts your audit trail. Invoice template changes should only impact the present and future invoices. You also can’t easily add invoice 1 of 8, invoice 2 of 8, etc. You have to have manually type it in the invoice description.
  • The detail for revenue and deferred revenue does not sync to the GL. You have to make a manually summary journal entry once a month.
  • There is no data validation on the billing and shipping state fields so when you run a report of “Sales by State”, you will have uncombined rows for “CA”, “California”, “Ca”, which isn’t helpful as we try to do an economic nexus review for sales tax.

Likelihood to Recommend

SO is helpful for small accounting and finance teams that do not want to manage revenue, deferred revenue schedules, ARR, and customer count in Excel. It is also well-suited for organizations that have very few mergers and acquisitions among their customer base, are not dependent upon the SO projections for FP&A, want to have a more automated AR invoice collections process, and receive payments through credit card and ACH easily.

VU
Verified User
Director in Finance and Accounting (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Maxio
2 years of experience

Want a Great Billing System for Subscriptions? Give Chargify A Try

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Chargify to handle subscriptions for our 1000+ members.

Pros

  • Can set up multiple price points (products) with ease
  • Discounts are super-easy to integrate
  • Reporting is fantastic, so you can easily see your churn, paid subscribers, etc
  • API allows you to create custom forms on your own site

Cons

  • Their sales tax integration could use more help
  • Limited ability to customize emails/invoices/landing pages
  • DKIM/SPF support is weak, resulting in some emails not being delivered

Likelihood to Recommend

While it works great for subscriptions, I'm not sure this would be robust enough for a non-subscription business.

PR
Padraic Ryan
Community Manager in Information Technology at eCommerceFuel (1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Maxio
2 years of experience

SaaSOptics is a game saver for automated B2B invoicing, collections and contract management

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used SaaSOptics for a few things:

<ol><li>Manage customer contracts.</li><li>Invoice customers.</li><li>Invoice collections.</li><li>Link between Salesforce and QuickBooks.</li></ol>

Pros

  • Very easy to automate and keep track of invoices.
  • Great collections tools - automate messaging to customers that drives collections via cadences functionality.
  • Single source of the truth, maintains everything related to each customer's contract. Schedules out invoicing, revenue recognition, renewals along with storing actual contract and notes.

Cons

  • Our implementation process was a bit overwhelming. Too much information, too deep, should have focused on core functionality first. I believe they fixed this subsequent to our implementation.
  • Should be able to attach physical contract to the contract level, not at the customer level.
  • I never really used the analytics and reporting functionality, seems like it would have been great.

Likelihood to Recommend

It fit our use case perfectly. We acquired hundreds of contracts with an acquisition (prior to had only a few contracts). Our business model completely changed and we needed to make sure there were no interruptions in billing and most important collections from these contracts. SaaSOptics helped me quickly get control of and manage these contracts and get processes in place.

Best used for recurring invoicing - monthly, quarterly annually, etc. Invoicing and collections can be automated without the need to hire staff.

CL
Christopher L. Smith
Chief Financial Officer in Finance and Accounting at GiveGab (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Maxio
3 years of experience
View profile

SaaSOptics tells you what you need.

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SaaSOptics for our billing needs. The invoicing service, past due reporting, and total financial history reports are used daily by executive leadership and customer management. Our CSMs are confident in using it and helping their customers. We track growth and expansion through the interactive reporting, and we are then make plans for continued success with our expanding users.

Pros

  • The default reports are easy to use and provide concise information.
  • Tracking what my customers have spent, and what items they have purchased, is easy to find and identify.
  • Their support squad is fantastic.

Cons

  • There are some minor UI changes that would improve ease of use and functionality.

Likelihood to Recommend

SaaSOptics is great for our billing management. It's easy to help customers update their billing information, sending them their current invoicing, and tracking any past due invoices. The reporting is clear to know where we are winning as a team.

I haven't found a scenario where SaaSOptics has not met my expectations for the service it provides.

VU
Verified User
Manager in Customer Service (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Maxio
2 years of experience

SaaSOptics

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently use SaaSOptics in Finance for sending out and tracking invoices for our SaaS clients. It has cut down on invoicing time tremendously, as we used to just manually create them in QB and track them using Excel. Some of the reports have been useful to product and sales teams as well.

Pros

  • Invoice Automation
  • Data Integrations
  • Customer Service

Cons

  • Options for Cash-based businesses. While it's not GAAP compliant and most users are accrual, many SaaS start ups are still small and operating on a cash basis.
  • Commissions Module since SO already has all our data intergrations
  • So many different features and data entry points that manual data entry errors are common

Likelihood to Recommend

SaaSOptics is awesome for growing companies that want to automate their invoicing. I like that it is also aimed at subscription based sales structures rather than sales that occur at a single point in time (but has the ability to support both). SaaSOptics makes it super easy to keep track of subscriptions, renewals, co-terms, etc. The reporting is a great feature, but we are unable to use most of the reports as we are a cash-based accounting firm. SO caters to accrual accounting and GAAP compliant firms which makes sense as it is the most commonly accepted accounting basis here in the US, but many small SaaS start-ups are still operating on cash basis. We are one of those companies, so we are able to get a ton of use out of the invoicing side of things, a lot of the reports are useless for us. We also wish SO had a commission module since we already integrate our CRM and accounting softwares into it, but that is not a make it or break it for us. We love the time SO has saved us.

VU
Verified User
Employee in Finance and Accounting (11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Maxio
2 years of experience

Chargify for subscriptions

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it for subscription box subscribers. This helps with keeping track of monthly, quarterly, biannual, and annual subscriptions. It has also been used for one time purchases, gift subscriptions (which are non-renewing), and special edition subscription. Changing subscription renewal dates in bulk is relatively simple. Canceling subscriptions in bulk can be a challenge though.

Pros

  • Subscription management
  • Bulk changes to renewal dates
  • Order exports

Cons

  • Bulk cancellations
  • Integrations with 3rd-party services
  • E-commerce order functionality

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited to renewing subscription products. It is not so great for e-commerce orders. If your business has only a few varying subscription products, it’s easy to use and manage. If you have a series of complex subscription services, it is not as useful and can be a bit time consuming to manage.

VU
Verified User
Manager (1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Maxio
4 years of experience

A Billing System That Bills

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Chargify is used as our billing system. We have software that is licensed on a monthly basis so customers pay for the licenses monthly. We use Chargify to charge and track all of our billing information. It is used by the company and it addresses the need for a billing system that integrates with our platform.

Pros

  • Billing - We've never had a problem with the billing not working.
  • Dunning - The dunning system is easy to use and automatically handles the missed payments.
  • Adjustments - It is easy to make adjustments to a customer's bill when needed.

Cons

  • Reporting - It doesn't provide the reporting we need so I have to do it manually. It doesn't track individual components like we need it to for monthly reporting.
  • Emails - The system's emails sometimes end up in junk mail, so I also follow up once a customer has missed 2 payment attempts.
  • Transactions - An easier way to get to the transactions would be nice. It takes many clicks to see the transaction history.

Likelihood to Recommend

Chargify is well suited for companies who need to offer a reoccurring license fee. I see it more suited for smaller companies, but we don't have the enterprise version so I'm not sure what it entails. It may offer more, in which case would make sense for larger organizations. I believe it is a great fit for smaller companies who need a system that is user friendly and fairly easy to use.

HR
Heather Robinette, MBA
Marketing Manger in Marketing at Conexlink (11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Maxio
1 year of experience
View profile