With demand for anything-as-a-service continuing to climb, the subscription economy is exploding. However, the increasing demands put on subscription-based enterprises is resulting in an industry that is in a constant state of flux. These dynamics represent a shift in how business needs to be conducted and that includes everything from how products and services are marketed and sold to how billing is handled. For today’s SaaS enterprises, this means an enterprise-ready billing solution that can adapt and grow to meet changing requirements.
Your Billing Solution Should Drive Long-Term Profitability
Complications of billing processes and systems don’t start and end with pricing and these challenges become more profound as SaaS companies grow. Billing is central to the financial success of your company, and a billing platform that is enterprise ready (regardless of where your business is on the growth scale) is essential for long-term profitability.
Enterprise-ready billing solutions are next-generation, end-to-end billing platforms that provide unparalleled rating and billing functionality. Built-in the cloud, these systems are designed to:
- Support any product, any service, any bundle, any promotion, and any discount plan easily and without manual effort.
- Automate complex billing and rating scenarios.
- Simulate the revenue impact of new pricing models or price changes across a mix of products or packages.
- Transition from simple one–time and subscription-based pricing models to metered and usage-based plans quickly and easily.
- Enable easy and accurate upgrading and downgrading between pricing tiers.
- Automate the entire quote-to-cash (Q2C) process.
- Incorporate dynamic pricing to handle complex account hierarchies, gain the foundation needed to price products and services contextually, implement creative pricing strategies in real time, etc.
- Integrate with up and downstream systems for a fully integrated financial ecosystem.
- Support a variety of secure payment methods with the ability to quickly accept and process payments on a global basis.
- Execute billing processes at scale with built-in workflows.
- Extract data at scale and translate the information into actionable insights to optimize performance.
- Empower customers to service themselves.
- Accelerate international growth with support for localized billing requirements, including multi-currency, multi-lingual, regional taxes, etc.
- Minimize security risks and adhere to compliance requirements with a secure billing architecture that aligns with global regulatory standards, provides application-level encryption, manages user access with role-based permissions, etc.
While the above provide key components of an enterprise-ready billing solution, there is another aspect that can’t be overlooked. The solution needs to have the foundational architecture and technology that provides agility and configurability. That will allow you to adapt to dynamic market requirements and extend the platform as your business grows.
How to Know if Your Billing System is Enterprise-Ready
With the number of billing solutions available, how can you be sure the one you choose meets both your current and future needs. To simplify the process, we developed the ABCs of an enterprise-ready billing solution.
- A – Adaptability and Extensibility
- B – Business Model Support
- C – Configure not Code
Adaptability and Extensibility
Typically, data is generated by, or managed within, disparate enterprise applications, such as product-usage information. Often an overlooked component of billing solutions, mediation is critical to normalize data, remove unnecessary usage records, and route the required information for rating and billing. An enterprise-ready billing solution provides the adaptability needed to ingest any type of data and convert it to the desired structure. With built-in mediation, you’re able to convert raw data from multiple sources to quickly develop and deploy innovative usage-based pricing models.
Traditional billing systems only provide time-driven, recurring invoicing cycles. While this works well for uncomplicated pricing models, SaaS enterprises require the flexibility to handle complex billing schemes. Enterprise-ready billing solutions enable you to create event-based invoicing cycles that are automatically triggered by specific milestones. Plus they provide this ability without the need to rely on third-party or custom-developed extensions.
Business Model Support
The data model resides at the core of any billing system and provides the logical interrelationships between different data elements. It defines customer accounts, specifies account and product rating models, structures product catalogs, reflects customer contracts, houses charging events, and records customer payments and finance interactions. Enterprise-ready billing solutions give you the flexibility to conform to the organization’s existing business models. These billing solutions are often architected as platforms rather than applications, allowing integration with existing data tables and providing the ability for the business to easily create new product relationship hierarchies.
Configure, Not Code
Traditional billing systems are typically rigid, and any customization needs require expensive service engagements with the billing solution vendor or a third party. Enterprise-ready billing solutions put the power of change in your hands. These solutions provide configuration functionality, enabling you to extend user interfaces, build workflows, add customer objects, fields, and relationships, synchronize data with other enterprise applications, etc. – without IT intervention.
Choose a Billing Solution that Grows with Your Business
As the SaaS market continues to flourish, you need to be two steps ahead to capture the attention of customers and rise above the competition. Growing your business and increasing profitability during these dynamic times requires not only operational changes, but systems that can expand and adapt to meet changing needs. Central to your adaptability and extensibility is your ability to quickly turn ideas into revenue. And for that you need an enterprise–ready billing solution that provides the flexibility and scalability for quick pivots.
BillingPlatform’s cloud-based enterprise-ready billing solution gives you the power to enable any kind of billing model and support even the most complex recurring revenue relationships. We provide a single platform solution that supports all your business requirements – any product, any service, any business model. And our unmatched agility allows you to extend the platform using point-and-click configuration, giving you complete control to support ever changing business needs. When you partner with BillingPlatform you get an enterprise-ready billing solution that not only handles today’s business needs but is easily extendable – so you’ll never outgrow your billing system. Request a free trial to see for yourself!
