Billing Software Buyer’s Guide
Billing Software Buyer’s Guide
Billing Software Buyer’s Guide
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04 Minute Read
What is automated billing software?
Automated billing software is a comprehensive solution designed to manage and automate the billing and invoicing processes of large and scaling organizations.
These systems handle complex billing scenarios, support multiple pricing models, integrate with various financial and operational systems, and ensure compliance with industry regulations.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the steps to successfully identify, test, and implement the right automated billing software for your business.
How do you increase billing automation and efficiency?
As your business scales, billing will grow — both in terms of volume and complexity. If you’re operating on a manual, homegrown, or legacy system, you’ll likely struggle to keep up with all the changes. These solutions simply were not architected to enable future growth strategies like modern pricing strategies, moving up market, global expansion, or acquisitions.
Homegrown systems perpetuate the burden on your technical resources and staff with manual workarounds. You have to custom build and maintain integrations to your sales channels, payment, gateways, tax engines and general ledger costing you millions of dollars per year.
This approach results in error-prone financial reporting between disparate systems and processes, exposing you to compliance risks and staff burnout from manual data reconciliation.
Your billing system shouldn’t be holding you back. In fact, the most successful companies use billing to their advantage. With the right automated billing software, your IT team can quickly adapt to new pricing, billing, payments, accounting, and extensibility requirements — becoming integral to business strategy and enabling continuous innovation.
With the wrong system, IT becomes an order taker and a growth bottleneck.
You need a billing system that’s future proof, helping you automate more and worry less.
What key capabilities should you look for?
When selecting a billing software solution, it’s essential to increase your level of automation and consider features that will support your business’s growth and evolving needs.
Here are the key capabilities you should prioritize:
- Automated invoicing: Build customer satisfaction by configuring invoices to be on-brand and accurately present every charge with the right currency, language, and custom notes specific to a customer
- Flexible pricing and packaging: Design, deploy, and iterate on one-time, recurring, usage, or hybrid pricing and packaging to stay competitive
- Usage metering: Capture, consolidate, and monetize usage data — all in one solution
- Order management: Simplify complex order management with an easy way to create, manage, change, and track subscriptions throughout the entire lifecycle
- Account management: Support for multi-entity, hierarchies
- E-Invoicing and tax compliance: Maintain global invoicing and tax compliance with pre-built integrations with industry-leading partners for global or niche compliance
- Option for integrated quoting: Capture, generate, and sync quotes across the customer lifecycle, from new sign-ups to upsells to renewals
- Reporting and analytics: View key recurring revenue metrics and understand how every change impacts customer lifetime value
- Integrations and extensibility: Scale your billing software with your business and seamlessly integrate with a wide range of other systems — such as CRM, ERP, CPQ, and payment gateways
- Proven record of excellence: A strong track record in the industry not only showcases the provider’s reliability and capabilities but also offers peace of mind that they can effectively support your business and monetization needs
How do you choose the right billing software?
- Consult the latest analyst reports
- Gather recommendations from peers and/or partners
- Identify your buying committee and stakeholder requirements
- Define your requirements and compile a comprehensive RFP
- Consult customer success stories and references
- Reach out to shortlisted vendors
- View a demo or trial
How do you build a billing project business case?
Clearly knowing and understanding the goals and objectives of your buying committee and stakeholders is key for a successful billing project.
As you embark on this project, there are several steps you’ll need to take:
- Align on the scope and goals of the project first
- Understand the pain points and value from the perspective of your stakeholders
- Highlight several key benefits and improvements provided by a new solution
- Build a persuasive and targeted business case
How do you know if you should build vs. buy?
Budget restrictions and other factors lead many businesses to build their own homegrown solution, but this could actually be much more costly in the long run.
If you’re thinking about billing management, be sure you understand the system requirements and the risks.
The risks of building your own billing software
Learn the three biggest risks of building a homegrown billing platform — and the impact of this decision for IT leaders, engineers, and the entire business.
Tip
Learn the key growth strategies revealed by the latest research
Recurring revenue business models have historically provided stability during turbulent times — and using the right billing software may just make a world of difference.
Subscribed Institute research reveals that over the past 12 years, companies in the Subscription Economy Index (SEI) have grown 3.4x faster than the companies in the S&P 500, which have historically represented more traditional, product-based businesses.
What sets these businesses apart from the rest and how are they continuing to grow in the face of macroeconomic headwinds?
Learn more about billing software
Now that we’ve covered the basics of billing software, it’s time to dive into each of the features and capabilities your business will need to streamline and scale your automated billing processes. Keep reading to learn more.
