Congratulations, the recurring customer relationships your software-as-a-service (SaaS) business built and nurtured are thriving. You took a chance and were one of the first SaaS businesses to incorporate consumption-based pricing. Partly due to the inherent consumption-based pricing benefits, you quickly onboarded new customers and fast-tracked your company’s growth. From customer acquisition to revenue recognition, your initial skeleton team had no trouble staying on top of day-to-day activities and providing the kind of customer care this pricing model fosters. However, as your customer base and offerings grew, the complicated spreadsheets your financial team used became increasingly time-consuming and riddled with errors. Although the finance team took great care building everything, those errors resulted in revenue loss. It’s time to invest in software to automate your financial activities. With automation as your goal, how can you be sure that you’re getting the best consumption-based pricing model software for your SaaS business?
Reap the Benefits of Consumption-Based Pricing Model Software
Your internal financial processes shouldn’t need to change to adapt to a vendor’s consumption-based pricing model software. On the contrary, the software should have the agility to conform to your business needs and requirements. To help you select the right consumption-based pricing model software, let’s uncover the top eight attributes and their benefits.
1) Configure, Price, Quote
This covers everything from the first entry in your customer relationship management (CRM) system through managing consumption-based pricing to recognizing payments in the general ledger. Unified quote-to-cash enables you to simplify operations, lower operational costs, eliminate quoting errors, and decrease time-to-market.
2) Mediation
This is critical to consumption-based pricing. A built-in mediation engine enables you to gather, normalize, enrich, and route raw usage data of any kind, from any source. With a mediation engine that’s automated and rules-based, you can filter out unnecessary usage records, develop tailored pricing models, and route information to be rated and billed.
3) Rating
Consumption-based pricing is inherently complex, and rating automation is a must in order to quickly modify pricing, develop innovative rating models, and differentiate your SaaS business from the competition.
4) Invoicing
Your customers expect accurate and timely invoices. Errors or delays can lead to customer churn and delay the cash flow that keeps your SaaS company running. The right consumption-based pricing model software enables your finance team to view invoices by geography, subsidiary, customer, or industry, as well as support complex account hierarchies for easy invoice consolidation or dynamic separation.
5) Revenue Recognition
The complexity of consumption-based pricing requires automated revenue recognition to improve accuracy and auditability. With the intelligence provided by consumption-based pricing model software, you gain the ability to streamline the revenue management process. That translates to faster and more efficient allocation, reconciliation, monitoring, and revenue recognition. Additionally, regardless of your billing approach or promotional offers, you’ll have peace of mind that you’re always in compliance with ASC 606 and IFRS 15.
6) Dunning
Even when doing everything right, payments can (and do) end up in arrears. Whether it’s because of expired debit/credit cards or insufficient funds, you need to put revenue recovery on autopilot. Automating the dunning process gives you the ability to automatically schedule and tailor messages to keep customers informed of outstanding balances, manage late fees, account suspension, and much more.
7) Collections
If you’re like many of your counterparts, one of your biggest challenges is managing outstanding balances. By automating the collections process you’re able to prioritize accounts that need attention, link payments to invoices, and maintain an audit trail of all activities,. This minimizes revenue loss, increases employee productivity, and even improves customer satisfaction.
8) Reporting & Analytics
Making informed business decisions requires up-to-the-minute intelligence. The inherent complexity of a consumption-based pricing model makes it vital for your finance teams to have access to granular billing data to assess the overall financial health of your business. Getting a clear picture requires reports that easily manipulate data, apply filters, create pivot tables, and automate complex calculations. Not to mention dashboards to create customized, role-based views, and provide real-time information; and analytics to extract meaningful information and translate the data into actionable strategies.
Consumption of your products and services are what drives your business forward. And the right consumption-based pricing model software provides the automation needed to supercharge your growth and revenue potential.
Simplify Consumption-Based Pricing
Is it time to trade your manual financial processes and disparate systems for the power of automated consumption-based pricing model software? If so, look no further. BillingPlatform’s cloud-based solution enables you to automate the entire quote-to-cash process – quickly and easily.
Designed in the cloud, our software delivers the unmatched agility and flexibility needed to run your SaaS consumption-based business. We help organizations gain greater efficiency, accuracy, and control of their billing processes. Not only will manual, error-prone processes become a thing of the past, but your overburdened financial staff won’t need to access multiple systems to acquire the information they need. BillingPlatform gives you the ability to easily connect your critical front- and back-office systems for a fully integrated financial ecosystem. Isn’t it time to simplify your consumption-based pricing, reduce errors and revenue leakage? Stop waiting and reach out to our team to learn how to get started.
