No subscription billing system is complete without analytics. Understanding your billing data is imperative to the day-to-day decision-makers in marketing, business intelligence, finance, and product management.
Setting up analytics in Kill Bill is DIY, but it’s simple to install and configure for your own needs. Remember that when you use Kill Bill as your recurring billing and payments platform, you actually own your data and have real-time, unlimited access to it. This is in stark contrast to some SaaS billing vendors who set restrictions on the number of API calls and the amount of data you can retrieve, and whose API endpoints don’t work for the data you need to extract!
Kill Bill Analytics Overview
Kill Bill’s analytics functionality is delivered via a plugin (it’s actually a type of notification plugin). You can install the plugin via Kaui (back-office user interface) or KPM (command line interface).
The plugin listens to the events that Kill Bill generates. When any system change occurs (e.g., ACCOUNT_CREATION), the plugin receives the event and rebuilds the analytics database tables.
It’s entirely possible for you to clone the analytics plugin repository and make changes to it before deploying it via Kaui or KPM.
The analytic reports can also:
- Support pie charts, line charts, and table formats.
- Handle multi-currency amounts. For more information, see Currency Conversion.
- Be displayed in Kaui (see below), but if you have a preferred data warehouse or visualization tool (e.g., Pentaho, Tableau, MicroStrategy, etc.), you can use that as the front-end display instead.
Analytics Database
The Kill Bill analytics database tables includes the following objects:
- Accounts
- Entitlement states
- Invoices
- Payments
- Subscriptions
- Tags and custom fields
The analytics database tables are separate from the system database and remain stable, though there is the potential for change with major version releases.
Canned Reports
The analytics plugin includes over a dozen reports that you can use as-is, though you’ll likely want to tweak them. In that case, you can build custom reports. We step you through how to do that in the Analytics Guide.
Subscription Billing Analytics for Kill Bill on AWS
If you’re running Kill Bill on AWS, the analytics plugin is already installed. We’ve also pre-configured three reports: Cancellations, Overdue States, and New Subscriptions.
You can find the analytics plugin on GitHub. For information on installing the analytics plugin and canned reports, see the Kill Bill documentation:
- Plugin Installation section in Analytics Guide
- Analytics Plugin section in Kill Bill on AWS Guide
