Credit Card Recurring Bills, do you use tokens?

Our business is based on monthly recurring billing but our architecture, set up nearly a decade ago, is stupid.  Basically, when a user signups, we put their credit card info into our merchant account at the credit card processing place and tell it to bill them monthly. If they cancel or make changes, we go in manually and change it. If their credit card declines, we get the report and also go through it manually. Lots of man hours.  Some mistakes. Yick.

It seems that a better system would be to start by placing the credit card at the vendor's shop (ie no change) but then to trigger the billing by sending over a file, presumably daily, of who to bill and how much. This is the "token" part.  As part of this, we should get back a decent automated report of successful  and not successful billings.

Is anyone out there who is a small business (tier 3), say under $25 million, using tokenized billing for recurring credit card billing. I'd like to share experiences.

John