Probably late to this party but at my employer we have a contract with MarkMonitor under which domains are auto-renewed and then we are invoiced for the cost.

Probably late to this party but at my employer we have a contract with MarkMonitor under which domains are auto-renewed and then we are invoiced for the cost. The advantage of this is that domain renewals are not broken by payment problems. Payment problems produce a failure state of "domain got renewed, the vendor is harassing us about an invoice"--which is much preferred to "domain did NOT get renewed, our site is down until we update our credit card." It also helps mitigate the "crucial employee departed" problem, since MarkMonitor won't just give up on an unpaid invoice... they will escalate if they don't get paid. Of course as a matter of practice we always have multiple people with access to the dashboard, but if all those people got kidnapped at once, the domains would still renew. I recognize that MarkMonitor is more expensive than Namecheap or GoDaddy or whoever, but I also bet that a lot of successful companies that are super reliant on their domains have never called for pricing. I don't work for a mega-corp; we're a nonprofit. And who knows, maybe other registrars may be willing to offer a similar payment structure. (I'm not affiliated with MM in any way--just a happy customer.)