Planity, a French leader in online reservations, save an hour a day thanks to the automation of payment collections offered by Zoho Billing.

Planity is a comprehensive digital platform for finding beauty and wellness professionals in proximity and making appointments instantly. Located in the heart of Paris, Planity sets out to solve the paradox of choice with a curated list of beauty establishments including customer reviews, operating hours, and everything consumers need to make an appointment. Launched in 2016 with a team of three, Planity now has over 100 employees and has carved a niche for itself in the industry, thriving with appointments being made, on average, every second.

The search

Planity has a partnership with over 10,000 establishments throughout France, including hair salons, barbers, beauty institutes, and spas. This side of its marketplace runs on a subscription basis. "We serve businesses by helping them widen their reach and acquire more customers. So, by virtue of our operating model, we knew that a subscription billing model would be a win-win for both us and our partners," said Antoine Puymirat, founder & CEO of Planity.

While looking for software to manage recurring billing, Antoine had three main criteria: It should facilitate multiple payment options to their customers, connect well with the other apps in their tech stack, and offer an intuitive clutter-free interface, just like theirs.

After evaluating multiple software options including Zuora, he decided to try out Zoho Billing.

The solution

Planity offers multiple plans to suit the needs of their various customers. As an extension to the booking functionality, Planity also sends appointment reminders to consumers via text messages, facilitates payment collection, and offers other services for their partner businesses. Since these additional services are optional, they have configured them as add-ons in Zoho Billing.

They've also integrated Zoho Billing with GoCardless and Stripe so their customers can pay via direct debit and credit cards. "After using Zoho Billing, the time we spend each month managing our recurring customers came down to zero, literally! It's because of automating our billing and payment collection processes, thanks to the integrations with GoCardless and Stripe," Antoine said.

By configuring automatic retry attempts for failed payments with Zoho Billing, the Planity team is able to increase productivity while also making sure that their customers are notified of failed renewal payments. "On average, Zoho Billing saves us an hour per day with automatic dunning of failed payments on our monthly subscriptions," Antoine said.

Planity uses Zoho CRM to manage its customer relationships and sales pipelines, and Antoine loves how easy it was to connect with Zoho Billing. "I'm not a programmer or what you call 'tech-savvy.' But, when I connected Zoho Billing with other layers of our tech stack, be it CRM or the payment gateways, all by myself, it was just magical! Also, the Zoho Billing support team responds with precise solutions whenever we need help," he said. Using REST APIs, they have connected Zoho Billing with their backend database systems, further eliminating manual data entry and follow-ups.

As the CEO, Antoine especially appreciates the easy-to-consume subscription metrics that Zoho Billing offers.

The benefits, ROI, and the road ahead

Besides Zoho Billing, the Planity team uses an array of Zoho apps for various business functions: Zoho CRM for front-office operations, Zoho Books for managing accounts receivable transactions, Zoho Inventory for tracking inventory of the iPads they sell, and so on.

And for Antoine, the time his team continually saves each day with Zoho Billing' automatic invoicing, payment collection, and dunning gives them an extremely valuable ROI.

"I had experience with Salesforce during my previous stint and it was too complex. So, we first switched to Zoho CRM and loved its intuitiveness. We could see the same value across all Zoho apps we use. Up next, we plan to switch from ActiveCampaign to Zoho Campaigns. It's exciting," Antoine said.