Regardless of the industry, recurring billing isn’t without challenges. Spreadsheets may have been fine when first starting out with just a handful of customers. However, as businesses grow the manual effort involved more than likely results in many things. Think of inefficient processes, billing errors, revenue leakage, and even customer churn. When this happens, implementing an enterprise recurring billing software solution becomes a heavy topic of conversation.
Consider the number of upgrades, downgrades, pauses, reactivations, discounts, promotions, and cancellations you handle. Now put it on a monthly basis across an increasing customer base. When looked at it from that perspective, is it any wonder that the manual processes many rely on are riddled with human errors that affect your bottom line and customer satisfaction?
Recurring Billing Software Described
When a company automatically invoices a customer for products or services rendered on a predetermined schedule such as monthly, quarterly, or annually – is recurring billing. However, recurring billing software gives subscription-based companies an efficient and automatic way to bill customers and collect payments. This reduces or even eliminates human efforts that lead to errors, revenue leakage, and customer dissatisfaction.
Depending on the sophistication of the recurring billing software platform, businesses can gain an unprecedented view of the entire invoice-to-payment process. All from a single view. Additionally, the platform can give the subscription business complete control over when invoices are sent. Plus, provide the ability to customize the timing and content of notifications and alerts to ensure timely payments.
What to Expect from Recurring Billing Software: Features, Functionality and Benefits
Recurring revenue received from your subscribers provides many benefits like a predictable cash flow, improved revenue, and increased validation. However, processes associated with recurring billing are more complex than one-off billing. Take for example the sheer number of pricing models available – from usage-based to hybrid and everything in between – as well as the types of recurring revenue business models.
Most recurring billing software vendors provide basic features and functionality. Providers with robust billing platforms offer the flexibility to scale and drive business growth. This gives you the ability to exceed customer expectations and gain a competitive advantage. Here are 9 of the top features, functions, and benefits you can expect to receive with an enterprise-grade recurring billing software solution that delivers advanced automation.
1) Single product catalog
Easily define and manage products and services, define rating, apply discounting rules, define dependencies, make bulk changes to rates, and standardize offerings across all product lines.
2) Point and click configuration / seamless workflows
Seamlessly and effortlessly create packages and bundles, as well as handle coupons, discounts, and prorations.
3) Customizable and configurable invoices
Recurring billing software allows you to view invoices by geography, subsidiary, customer, or industry. It also supports complex account hierarchies for invoices that can be consolidated or separated dynamically.
4) Increased security
Give customers an easy and secure way to make electronic payments using debit/credit cards, PayPal, ACH, etc. Enhance security with SOC, PCI, and 3DSv2 compliance to meet customer demands and region-specific mandates.
5) Intelligent and compliant revenue recognition
Enterprise recurring billing software streamlines revenue management to allocate, reconcile, monitor, and recognize revenue for any pricing model, billing approach, or promotional offer, while staying compliant with ASC 606/IFRS 15.
6) Single Solution
Combine billing, dunning, collections, and payment processing to reduce days sales outstanding (DSO), improve cash flow, and plug revenue leaks.
7) Integrated business reporting and intelligence
Optimize billing with recurring billing software by turning data into actionable insights by harnessing information across reporting, dashboards, and analytics. Maximize your business’ potential by having up-to-date information on these and more:
- Total customer value (TCV)
- Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
- Annual recurring revenue (ARR),
- Cash flow
- Customer churn
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Customer acquisition costs (CAC)
- Sales
- Earned revenues
8) Support for localized billing requirements
Stop worrying about things like multi-currency, multi-lingual, regional tax, etc. Expand across borders by localizing your solution to satisfy region-specific requirements and meet the unique needs of customers across the globe.
9) Seamless integration of front- and back-end systems
Reduce time to market and gain a single source of truth with seamless integration of service delivery systems, financial systems, customer relationship management (CRM), business process management (BPM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), tax solutions, etc.
When the features and functionality above work in unison, you’ll deliver the exceptional experiences customers expect. Recurring revenue billing automation enables you to deliver timely and accurate invoices, gain a better understanding of your customers, and take proactive action to eliminate potential revenue leaks.
Take a deeper dive and explore the history of subscription billing, its pricing models, and the key requirements of subscription billing.
The Future of Recurring Billing Software is Here
The best automated recurring billing solutions need to be flexible, scalable, efficient, and comprehensive. These characteristics enable you to streamline billing cycle processing, reduce manual errors, minimize revenue leakage, and accelerate customer loyalty.
BillingPlatform offers a cloud-based enterprise-grade billing platform, giving you the power to enable any type of billing model and support even the most complex recurring revenue relationships. When it comes to speed, our customers outpace the competition by bringing new products and services to market 30%, while reducing operational spend by as much as 50%. With our end-to-end quote-to-cash (Q2C) solution, you’re able to easily handle today’s fluctuating requirements, are ready for whatever tomorrow may bring, and monetize all revenue opportunities. Let our team of experts answer your questions today.
