Where billing stands in this sample
Five numbers to start with. Each ring is the share of companies in the current slice. Change the slice above and watch them move.
say billing got better than in 2025
name failed card payments as a top challenge
take more than 45 days to get paid
win back more than half of failed payments
plan to spend on billing automation
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Who is in the sample
The people answering are the ones closest to billing: finance leads, billing and revenue operations, and founders at the smaller companies. Click a size bar to filter the whole report by it.
Respondent roles
Company size by staff
Click a bar to filter
Who owns billing
What gets in the way of getting paid
Respondents picked every challenge that applies. Filter to invoice-led companies and slow collections climb; filter to monthly card billing and failed payments take over.
Top billing challenges
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The metrics teams actually track
Share of companies in the slice that review each metric at least monthly. Payment success and retention top the list. Dunning recovery, the number behind most involuntary churn, is one of the least tracked.
What companies want to fix in 2026
Each respondent picked their top two priorities. Stopping involuntary churn and speeding up cash lead overall, and the order shifts with how a company bills.
Top two priorities for 2026
Better than last year, mostly
How billing operations compare with 2025, and where the improvement came from. Highly automated teams are the most likely to say things got much better.
Billing operations vs. 2025
Where the improvement came from
Share of all companies in the slice
Pick a metric, see the spread
Choose one of seven billing metrics. The left chart shows how the slice is spread against all companies; the right shows the middle half and median for each group. Click a group bar to filter by it.
Distribution
Share of companies in each band
By group
Each bar spans the middle half of companies in a group; the dark tick is the median.
Click a bar to filter · line marks the median for all companies
Payment success and failed payments
How many card charges succeed the first time, how many failures are won back by retries and reminders (dunning), and what is left over: customers lost to a payment that never went through.
First-attempt payment success rate
Dunning recovery by automation level
Median share of failed payments recovered within 30 days
Failed payments vs. involuntary churn
Each dot is a company. The more failed payments a team wins back, the fewer customers it loses to them.
How teams see failed payments
Main way the team finds out a payment failed
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Days sales outstanding and old invoices
Card billing collects almost straight away. Invoices take longer, and the more revenue a company collects by invoice, the longer cash sits in receivables.
Days sales outstanding
Share of receivables over 90 days old
Days sales outstanding vs. share of revenue collected by invoice
Each dot is a company
Net revenue retention and involuntary churn
Net revenue retention counts expansion, contraction and churn together. Involuntary churn is the slice of churn nobody chose: a customer lost because a payment failed and was never recovered.
Net revenue retention
Involuntary churn, monthly
Share of customers lost each month to failed payments
Monthly or annual, card or invoice
The plan and payment mix explains a lot of what sits above it. Monthly card billing fails more often but collects fast; annual invoices rarely bounce but take weeks to pay.
Plan mix by company size
Average share of customers (plans) or revenue (payment method) in each group
Billing model
Click a slice to filter
Main payment method
Click a slice to filter
How much of billing runs itself
Most teams have automated invoices and reminder emails. Fewer let software match payments to invoices, and chasing overdue invoices is the least automated job of all.
Billing automation maturity
Where automation is used
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Where the 2026 budget is going
Plans split two ways: better tools, and more or better-trained people. Mostly manual teams are the keenest to change billing platform.
Planned improvements
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Billing team and budget outlook
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Plans for billing automation
What will move billing next
Respondents were asked what will have the biggest effect on their billing in the next two years, and how they feel about AI in billing operations.
Biggest expected effect on billing
How respondents see AI in billing
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How would your numbers rank?
Move each slider to your own number. You're compared with the slice chosen above, so set it to companies like yours first. Nothing you enter leaves this page or is saved.
Peer group: All companies · 486 companies
Glossary
| Term | In full | What it means here |
|---|---|---|
| SaaS | Software as a service | Software sold as a subscription and billed on a schedule. |
| Payment success rate | First-attempt payment success rate | Share of card charges that go through on the first try. |
| Failed payment | Declined or failed charge | A charge the card issuer or bank turned down, often for an expired card or lack of funds. |
| Dunning | Dunning and payment recovery | Retries, reminder emails and in-app prompts that try to recover a failed payment. |
| Dunning recovery | Dunning recovery rate | Share of failed payments recovered within 30 days. |
| Involuntary churn | Involuntary churn rate | Share of customers lost in a month because a payment failed and was never recovered. |
| Days sales outstanding | Also called debtor days | Average number of days between billing a customer and getting paid. |
| Receivables 90+ | Receivables over 90 days | Share of unpaid invoices that are more than 90 days past their issue date. |
| NRR | Net revenue retention | Revenue from last year's customers this year, after upgrades, downgrades and churn, as a share of what they paid last year. |
| Refund rate | Refunds as a share of billed revenue | Money returned to customers, including chargebacks, as a share of what was billed. |
| Smart retries | Scheduled payment retries | Retrying a failed charge at times it is more likely to succeed instead of on a fixed schedule. |
| Card updater | Card account updater | A service that refreshes expired or replaced card details before the next charge. |
A report you can explore instead of skim
Benchmark Studio is a Lab prototype: one template that turns survey answers and metric data into a report people can explore. This version is set up for software billing, but the structure is the same for any industry that collects benchmark data.
Everything here runs in your browser. The data is generated when the page loads, the charts redraw for each slice, and nothing you choose or enter is sent anywhere.
Sitting on benchmark data?
If you run an industry survey or hold anonymised metrics from your customers, this is the kind of report it could become. I'd like to hear how you share it today.
I'd use thisor write to kevin@kevinhorek.com