Regardless of the industry, for a business to flourish it needs to run with heightened efficiency. This requires removing obstacles and minimizing the potential for errors. Business process management software has the capability to streamline business processes – virtually putting your predictable and repeatable processes on autopilot.
As one of the most critical processes your company handles, billing by its very nature is prone to time-consuming manual effort that often leads to errors. Errors that aren’t handled swiftly and accurately can result in customer churn and revenue loss. Considered a “blueprint” to streamline a variety of business functions, business process management can manage and execute on even the most complex billing processes and workflows, enabling you to rise above the competition.
Get Tangible Results with Billing Automation
We live in a hyper-dynamic environment, where the only constant is change. In the age of digitalization, business processes are rapidly changing, as well as opening the door to new challenges. To keep ahead of the steady flow of changes, billing success requires the following five business process management software capabilities.
1) Agility
You need to bring products and services to market faster than your competitors. Unfortunately, this process is often impeded by rigid billing systems that require custom coding or IT development. The disadvantages are great and include the time to develop the code as well as the need for you to justify the cost. All of which of course may result in your competitors launching before you.
To consistently launch new products and services ahead of the competition, you need agile business process management software that puts the power of change in your hands. With a cloud-based billing solution you get the agility needed to keep innovation flowing. The ability to leverage custom data models lets you configure new products, services and business models without IT intervention – allowing you to launch new offerings and payment models in hours or days instead of weeks or months.
2) Native Workflow Automation
Spreadsheets and manual effort introduces human error into your financial operations. When properly implemented, automation saves time and facilitates a higher level of precision. However, workflow automation capabilities differ across billing systems. Some offer basic functionality such as final approval for invoice delivery, while others provide complete control over workflow customization. If you have sophisticated pricing models, you’ll require the ability to easily customize your workflows using a point-and-click interface.
When your business processes are based on your products, accounts, pricing models, and billing terms, it’s imperative that you have highly granular native workflow functionality that is configurable and manageable by your business users. The more you’re able to successfully automate your processes, the higher your billing efficiency and accuracy will be – and isn’t this the ultimate goal of business process management software?
3) Flexible Rating
Your customers expect personalized pricing and rating options, and delivering on their needs is critical to remain profitable. Some billing systems provide the capability for users to configure dynamic pricing models without IT intervention, others only allow the ability to deploy simple subscription/recurring models. While still others enable highly complex rating schemes based on multiple variables and market conditions.
Your needs may be different than your competitors, however to get the most flexibility the pragmatic choice is a billing platform that gives you complete control over pricing, and equips you with the tools to design the product packages your clients desire. The key to obtaining flexible rating functionality is in business process management software that doesn’t require custom code or programming expertise. Ultimately, it’s about the flexibility and adaptability to ensure that you’re able to streamline your processes for improved efficiency.
4) Native Mediation
Billing systems depend on data that is generated by other enterprise applications. Knowing this makes it essential that your billing system has the ability to interpret structured data, calculate amounts owed, and invoice in a timely manner. As we already established, billing systems vary greatly in their capabilities – and it’s no different when it comes to their ability to normalize raw usage data.
A robust and sophisticated billing system should offer native mediation capabilities that can aggregate and analyze usage data from any source, and quickly transform it into revenue potential. In addition, the billing platform should provide integration frameworks and robust application programming interfaces (APIs) to seamlessly integrate to disparate systems.
5) Extensibility
Regardless of the business process management software, billing is no longer a back-office, isolated process. The need to connect to usage feeds and external applications is essential for companies to be able to access all of their financial data from a single source. This enables business units to coordinate with each other, and support the level of clarity and interconnectedness necessary to monitor your financial health.
With a cloud-based extensible business model, you’re able to simplify your operations, reduce data entry errors, and ultimately save time creating, testing, and deploying changes to the system. The extensibility found in some billing systems enables you to automate repetitive tasks, integrate with other systems for a consolidated view, and synchronize data with other enterprise systems – enabling you to deliver a complete, end-to-end billing experience.
Evolve Your Business With Agile Business Process Management Software
Regardless of how complex your product packages or pricing schemes, BillingPlatform gives you the ability to support all of your business requirements – any product, any service, any business model – on a single platform. We’ve taken the steps to incorporate business process management strategies into our core platform so that you can remove profit draining obstacles and streamline your revenue-generating processes, giving you the time to take your business into the future. Talk to our team today to learn more!
