Recurly + NetSuite Integration

The Recurly-NetSuite integration automates subscription billing accounting -- invoices, prorations, refunds, dunning events, and revenue recognition entries flow from Recurly into NetSuite without manual journal entries. Most subscription companies outgrow manual reconciliation at a few hundred subscribers.

Subscription Billing Creates an Accounting Mess

Recurly is excellent at what it does -- managing subscription plans, handling upgrades and downgrades, retrying failed payments, and reducing churn. But all of that activity generates financial data that needs to end up in NetSuite, and it's rarely a clean one-to-one mapping.

A single customer might upgrade mid-cycle, generating a prorated credit and a new charge. Another customer's payment fails, gets retried three times, and finally succeeds on day four. A third customer cancels with a partial refund. Each of these scenarios creates multiple financial events that need accurate journal entries in NetSuite.

Most teams start by manually exporting Recurly data and posting summary journal entries. That works until you hit a few hundred subscribers. Then the volume, the edge cases, and the rev rec implications make manual processing unsustainable.

What We Build

Invoice and Payment Sync: When Recurly generates an invoice, a corresponding invoice (or cash sale) appears in NetSuite. Payments collected by Recurly create customer payment records applied to those invoices. We map Recurly's plan and add-on structure to your NetSuite item list so revenue hits the correct GL accounts.

Subscription Lifecycle Events: New subscriptions, renewals, upgrades, downgrades, cancellations, and pauses all generate appropriate transactions in NetSuite. Upgrades create credit memos for the unused portion and new invoices for the upgraded plan. Cancellations with refunds generate the correct reversal entries.

Revenue Recognition: For companies under ASC 606, we configure NetSuite's revenue recognition schedules to align with Recurly's billing periods. Monthly subscriptions are straightforward, but annual plans paid upfront need deferred revenue treatment. We build the mapping so revenue schedules generate automatically based on the subscription term.

Dunning and Failed Payments: Recurly's dunning management retries failed payments on a schedule. The integration tracks these attempts and only creates NetSuite payment records when collection succeeds. Failed invoices can be flagged or written off based on your accounting policy.

Technical Architecture: We typically connect through Recurly's webhooks API and REST API v3. Webhooks push events in real-time to middleware (Celigo, Workato, or a custom service), which transforms the data and creates NetSuite records via SuiteTalk. For high-volume implementations, we batch process during off-peak hours to avoid NetSuite governance limits.

Key Benefits

• Accurate subscription revenue. Every billing event flows to NetSuite with the correct amount, period, and account mapping.
• ASC 606 compliance. Deferred revenue and revenue recognition schedules generated automatically from subscription data.
• Reduced manual work. Finance teams stop manually posting billing summaries and start reviewing pre-coded transactions.
• Real-time visibility. MRR, churn, and subscriber counts reflected in NetSuite dashboards without waiting for month-end exports.

Is This Right for You?

This integration is essential for any subscription business with 200+ active subscribers running both Recurly and NetSuite. The volume of billing events and the complexity of subscription accounting make manual processes untenable.

If you're just starting out with a handful of subscribers, you can probably get by with monthly summary entries for a while. But plan for the integration early -- the longer you wait, the more historical data you'll need to reconcile.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does a Recurly NetSuite integration take to implement?expand_more

Does the Recurly integration support NetSuite revenue recognition?expand_more

Can Recurly transactions sync to NetSuite in real time?expand_more

How are Recurly refunds and credits handled in NetSuite?expand_more

Let's talk about connecting Recurly to your NetSuite