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Modern billing features
Upgrading with modern billing features
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06 Minute Read
Identifying the automated billing features you need
Every business is unique, and so are its billing needs. That’s why modern billing software not only provides a full suite of built-in tools and features right out of the box, but they also make it easy to tailor fit the system to your business.
In this chapter, we’ll help you identify the automated billing features and capabilities your business will need to create more streamlined, efficient billing processes that support growth and scalability for years to come.
Automated and customizable invoicing
Manual invoicing is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors, which can lead to delays in payments and strained customer relationships. By automating these processes, you ensure that invoices are generated accurately and delivered on time, every time.
Look for billing software that supports:
- Automated bill runs: Automatically generate invoices on a set schedule or ad-hoc basis for groups of customers with similar billing preferences.
- Customizable billing triggers: Choose from monthly, annual, or daily billing cycles. Set up billing triggers based on specific events or dates, ensuring your billing process matches your operational requirements.
- Invoice presentment: Configure invoices to be on-brand and accurately present every charge with the right currency, language, and custom notes specific to a customer.
- Invoice adjustments: Ensure invoices remain accurate and compliant with gapless billing requirements. Create credit and debit memos to correct invoices and manage the balance due on a particular invoice or account.
Flexible pricing and packaging
Your customer expectations are at their highest and they demand flexibility when it comes to what, how, and when they buy. You’ll need a solution that allows you to quickly respond to customer and market demands and scale or pivot your pricing models as your business grows.
Look for billing software that supports:
- One-time charges: Offer single payments for products or services, allowing straightforward transactions that fit customer preferences and business needs.
- Recurring charges: Implement flexible subscription models with options for flat fees, per unit pricing, volume pricing, and more.
- Usage-based pricing: Monetize services through usage-based models like prepaid balance, minimum commitment, pay-as-you-go, overage, and more.
- Out-of-the-box pricing: Look for a low-code/no-code, business-user-friendly pricing designer featuring a large selection of built-in pricing models.
- Streamlined experimentation: With the right tools, you can quickly launch, test, and iterate on a mix of pricing models and gain valuable insights to continue optimizing your go-to-market strategy.
Comprehensive order management
Order management is an important part of the overall customer experience of your business. The process typically starts right from when a customer places an order and continues until it is fulfilled.
Though it is the oldest and most basic cycle of commerce, managing orders can be a surprisingly complex challenge.
Whether you need to update a customer’s billing information, apply a credit, or modify a contract, your billing software should provide the tools to handle these changes smoothly and efficiently. For example, when you modify a customer’s subscription plan, the system should automatically adjust future invoices, update financial records, and notify the customer of the change.
Effortless modifications also extend to handling exceptions, such as billing disputes or adjustments for returned products. Your billing software should allow you to quickly resolve these issues while maintaining a clear audit trail for compliance and reporting purposes.
Look for billing software that supports:
- Support for omni-channel orders: Ingest orders from multiple channels such as quoting, website, apps, service partners and more.
- Subscriber order changes: Orchestrate the downstream business impacts kicked off by every subscription order change across billing, payments, collections, rev rec and more.
- Order metrics: Being able to track order metrics like quantity, MRR, TCB, TCV, and ELP is critical to help you see the impact order actions have on business performance.
Intuitive account management
As part of your billing system, you’ll need a centralized place to manage all billing information about your customers, including company and contact information, payment terms, and preferred payment methods. With intuitive account management capabilities, you can quickly and easily set up, adjust, and report on account ownership and hierarchies.
Look for billing software that supports:
- Account hierarchies: Set up and adjust parent-child account relationships for all accounts.
- Hierarchical billing: Allow subscriptions to be owned by one account and billed to another. For example, roll usage up from child accounts and bill to parent account.
- Multi-level reporting: Report on all entities at the parent level in one consolidated report.
Integrated e-invoicing and tax management
Invoicing is an integral process of business financial operations. However, paper-based invoicing is labor-intensive and prone to human error. But today, e-invoicing has taken over from the traditional invoicing process.
What is e-invoicing?
E-invoicing, or electronic invoicing, is the process of sending and receiving invoices in an electronic format, rather than on paper. This involves the exchange of invoice data in a structured, machine-readable format that enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems can efficiently process, such as XML or JSON, instead of sending a PDF or a physical paper invoice.
Many countries are now mandating the use of e-invoicing as a way to improve tax compliance and reduce fraud. Companies with a global presence must consider these evolving regulations to continue their business in regions that they have a local presence.
Businesses are adopting e-invoicing as a way to become more competitive, streamline their operations, reduce their carbon footprint, and maintain regulatory compliance.
Look for billing software that supports:
- Built-in e-invoicing: Pre-built integrations to leading tax software vendors that can efficiently deal with various tax types and rules across several jurisdictions globally.
- Configurable templates: Meet the specific requirements of any country, ensuring invoices meet local standards.
- Accurate tax calculations: Apply accurate and complete tax calculations on invoices based on nexus and jurisdiction.
- Tax reporting and analytics: Export telemetry data for tax preparation or remittance and view comprehensive management reports.
Tip
Be prepared for new and changing e-invoicing requirements
Currently, over 100 countries worldwide have
e-invoicing legislation in place, and another 50 have plans in place to craft such legislation. These mandates often only apply to business to government (B2G) transactions, but we may see an increased impact on business to business (B2B) transactions in the coming years.
Streamlined financial close and reporting
To stay competitive and maintain financial accuracy, your business needs timely and efficient aggregation, reconciliation, and validation of financial data. This will help reduce the time and effort required to close the books, and ultimately, reduce costs and mitigate risk.
By leveraging robust billing software with advanced reporting capabilities, companies can gain real-time insights into their financial health, ensure compliance with accounting standards, and make more informed decisions to drive growth.
Look for billing software that supports:
- Comprehensive financial reporting: Look for advanced reporting tools that offer customizable financial reports, dashboards, and analytics. These should include detailed insights into revenue, expenses, cash flow, and key performance indicators.
- Real-time data integration: Integration with other financial and ERP systems should be seamless to ensure that financial data is updated in real time. This reduces delays in closing the books and provides accurate, up-to-date information.
- Audit trails and compliance tracking: The billing system should have built-in audit trails that track all changes and transactions. This helps ensure transparency and makes it easier to comply with financial regulations and prepare for audits.
An option for quoting
Business and innovations move quickly — you need a Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solution that can keep up.
Look for billing software that supports:
- Lifelong quoting: Create and amend quotes for the entire customer lifecycle from signup through upgrades, renewals, and cancellations.
- Native ramp deals: Natively handle and configure complex, multi-year deal arrangements over any time period and view metrics for each change within these time-intervals.
- Real-time quoting metrics: Measure the impact of every deal on recurring revenue and quota attainment. Plus, when you have a complete order-to-cash solution in place, it becomes your single source of truth, giving you confidence that what you quote or book will match to what you bill for (and recognize in revenue).
The evolution of CPQ software
Explore how CPQ software has evolved to meet the demands of modern business and the benefits it can deliver to SaaS companies.
Learn more about billing software
Customer preferences and market dynamics are always shifting. You need billing software that’s agile and scalable enough to evolve with your business.
Keep reading to learn more about how the right pricing tools can help you experiment with new strategies, support new offerings, and go to market more quickly.
