Finance organizations look beyond ERP for subscription billing, collections and revenue automation
San Mateo, Calif. – December 11, 2018 – Zuora, Inc. (NYSE: ZUO), the leading cloud-based subscription management platform provider, today announced its Winter ‘19 product release with a focus on automation and usability across Zuora Billing, Zuora Collect, and Zuora RevPro.
According to the Subscription Economy Index™, subscription-based companies see revenue growing between five and nine times faster than S&P 500 companies. Over the past five years, Zuora customers saw a steady 307% increase in invoices, resulting in more invoice adjustments, complex prorations, and other downstream impacts on finance teams. With this rapid growth, finance organizations must evolve to take on the increasing volume and complexity that come with increased subscription transactions.
For companies with a legacy ERP system, this growth creates pains for different roles in the finance organization:
- Billing teams have to manually track and resolve issues for recurring invoices, such as account updates, late fees, or expired payments
- Collections agents need to chase down unpaid invoices and failed payments, one at a time
- Revenue accountants must manually reconcile the impact of complex contract changes on revenue recognition
In the Subscription Economy, finance organizations must adopt a new system and evolve billing, collections, and revenue operations to eliminate manual redundancies and enable more efficient growth.
With the Winter ’19 Release, new capabilities added to Zuora’s product portfolio bring greater automation to help finance teams increase productivity:
- Reduced time spent on billing tasks and complex account updates with automated workflows
- Easier collaboration amongst collection teams to resolve unpaid invoices and at-risk accounts
- More efficient month end close to meet ASC 606 revenue compliance through disclosure reporting and intelligent exception handling
- Faster turnaround to create new automated processes, such as applying late fees, calculating usage, or previewing upcoming invoices, using the enhanced workflow user interface
“This product release is all about helping finance teams save time and reduce the errors that come from completing complex, redundant tasks manually,” said Tom Krackeler, SVP of Product at Zuora. “We are doubling down on customer usability and automation so that companies can rapidly grow without putting a big burden on back-office teams, processes, and systems.”
Zuora Billing Adds New Workflow Tools to Automate Processes
In the Subscription Economy, Billing Operation teams shift from drafting one-off invoices to managing complex recurring invoices through automation. The new Workflow tools enable users to:
- Automate Billing Tasks: Automate complex billing processes such as applying late fees to accounts, calculating usage by unique devices, previewing bill runs, and more
- Automate Custom Code: Execute custom code with AWS (Amazon Web Services) Lambda automatically for any business use case
- Create Workflows Fast: Build the most complex workflows in minutes with a new intuitive UI that includes features such as multiple paths and draggable connections between tasks
“Workflow has made life so much easier for us,” said Jason Gulledge, Founder and VP of Development of StackPath. “Workflow is intelligent and powerful, enabling my team to become even more efficient, while improving customer experience for our end customers. I consider it an absolute must have for anyone who uses Zuora.”
Zuora Collect Expands with New Collaboration Tools for Added Visibility
Collections teams in the Subscription Economy shift from sending one-off emails for delinquent accounts to leveraging tools that prevent revenue leakage and involuntary churn. New capabilities in Zuora Collect enable users to:
- Generate Branded Account Statements: Schedule and send recurring account statements to customers automatically to provide them with their full account history
- Collaborate on Delinquent Accounts: Capture and collaborate on detailed notes for at-risk accounts amongst collections agents with the Collections Window
“Zuora Collect has helped us reduce churn and freed up our sales team so they can focus on new business,” said Margaret De Luna, President of TheStreet.
Zuora RevPro Continues Focus on Revenue Automation and ASC 606 Compliance
In the Subscription Economy, Revenue Accountants shift from manually reconciling revenue to actively driving revenue policies. New Zuora RevPro capabilities enable users to:
- Capture Revenue Anomalies: Capture and communicate revenue anomalies while processing revenue to enable faster reconciliation
- Manage Disclosure Aggregation: Process and performance improvement to help customers generate key revenue reports required for disclosure reporting under ASC 606 and close the books in a timely fashion
Press Contact
Jayne Gonzalez
press@zuora.com
408-348-1087
About Zuora, Inc.
Zuora provides the leading cloud-based subscription management platform that functions as a system of record for subscription businesses across all industries. Powering the Subscription Economy®, the Zuora platform was architected specifically for dynamic, recurring subscription business models and acts as an intelligent subscription management hub that automates and orchestrates the entire subscription order-to-cash process, including billing and revenue recognition. Zuora serves more than 900 companies around the world, including Box, Komatsu, Rogers, Schneider Electric, Xplornet and Zendesk. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Zuora also operates offices in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, San Francisco, London, Paris, Beijing, Sydney, Chennai and Tokyo. To learn more about the Zuora platform, please visit zuorainternprd.wpengine.com.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including but not limited to statements regarding the expected benefits of Zuora’s Winter ‘19 product releases, Zuora’s expectations regarding companies shifting to subscription business models, and the expected growth and trends in the market for subscription businesses. Any statements that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied in forward-looking statements due to a number of factors, including but not limited to, risks detailed in the “Risk Factors” section of Zuora’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on September 12, 2018, as well as other documents that Zuora may file from time to time with the SEC. The forward-looking statements in this press release are based on current expectations as of the date of this press release and Zuora undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
This press release also includes market data and certain other statistical information and estimates from industry analysts and/or market research firms. Zuora believes these third party reports to be reputable, but has not independently verified the underlying data sources, methodologies or assumptions. Information that is based on estimates, forecasts, projections, market research or similar methodologies is inherently subject to uncertainties and actual events or circumstances may differ materially from events and circumstances reflected in this information.
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